Tools for Understanding Climate Change & Its Impacts
ATTRIBUTION SCIENCE
Weather Events Attribution How much more likely did climate change make a heat wave or extreme weather event to occur?
Climate Central’s U.S. Climate Shift Index Map
shows how likely a temperature is in today’s altered climate vs. how common it would be in a climate without human-caused climate change.
PUBLIC OPINION
These Yale m
aps show how Americans’ climate change beliefs, risk perceptions, and policy support vary at the state, congressional district, metro area, and county levels as of 2021.
IPSOS 2023 Global Survey.
NEW MEXICO CLIMATE POLICIES AND ACTIONS
U.S. Climate Alliance member states are working to achieve the Paris Agreement’s goal of keeping temperature increases below 1.5 degrees Celsius by reducing emissions, accelerating action, centering equity, and tracking progress. Explore New Mexico’s policies and actions across the Alliance’s 10 key policy areas. Numbers presented below only reflect the number of policies in this database and thus may not reflect all climate policies pursued.
CLIMATE CHANGE: THE BIG PICTURE
The Climate Toolbox is a collection of web tools for visualizing past and projected climate and hydrology of the contiguous United States. Includes future crop suitability, future streamflows, future climate scenarios at specific locations, future climate in tribal regions, and lots of historic data for a region. The Climate Toolbox Tool Summaries explains several of the tools and Case Studies show how people in different jobs use the tools. Applications lists the tools appropriate for Agriculture, Climate, Fire and Water.
The Climate Change Tracker is a set of dashboards of up-to-date estimates of policy-relevant global climate indicators reported to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). These indicators follow the causal chain from emissions (CO2 dashboard, Methane dashboard, N2O dashboard) to Global Warming (dashboard), including greenhouse gas emissions, human induced warming and the remaining global carbon budget. The methodologies used to update the indicators are directly traceable back to the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6). The data is based on the most recent data from the Indicators of Global Climate Change Collaboration, Global Carbon Project, and the PRIMAP-hist national historical emissions time series.
Climate Explorer graphs and maps historic and projected climate data for cities and counties, shows when historic data exceeded user-defined thresholds and compares observed daily weather to long-term climate estimates.
Climate Central Resources include Climate Change stripes, hotter nights, expanding mosquito range, higher cooling demand and other climate related data for many U.S. cities including the Albuquerque/Santa Fe area and Las Cruces.
Environmental Protection Agency Climate Indicators include streamflow, ocean temperature, and a section of interactive graphs of greenhouse gas emissions, climate forcing, temperatures, heat waves in cities, growing season, west nile virus cases, and changes in marine species distributions, cherry tree blooming dates in D.C. and stream temperatures in Snake River. There is also a Climate Indicator Map Viewer.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has dashboards that track climate change and natural variability over time. Indicators include the annual greenhouse gas index, arctic sea ice summer minimum, mountain glaciers, ocean heat content, global sea level, northern hemisphere spring snow, incoming sunlight, global average surface temperature, arctic oscillation, North Atlantic Oscillation, El Niño and La Niña Oceanic Niño Index, Pacific-North American Pattern and Southern Oscillation Index.
It also provides up-to-date, free-to-use U.S. and global weather and climate maps of averages, outlooks and projections of temperature, precipitation, snow and ice, oceans, drought and severe weather.
A climate primer explains the difference between climate and weather, how climate is determined today and in the past and how to find the data you need on the website. News & Features contain the latest on climate and weather. An event tracker links recent events to climate.
Tools & Interactives section includes links to a variety of tools including historic summer heat in the U.S. web map, and the NOAA View Data Exploration Tool, which allows you to create world maps of indicators such as sea and land surface temperatures, ice cover and temperatures in different atmospheric levels over different time periods
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n addition NOAA National Centers for Climate Information Climate Monitoring includes Monthly Climate Reports (droughts, wildfires + more), Climate at a Glance (near real-time analysis of monthly temperature and precipitation data from city to global levels; time series and rankings +), Billion Dollar Disasters Report (by state, year, disaster type), plus a lot more datasets on weather and climate. NOAA past temperature and precipitation trends by state.
NMSU New Mexico Weather data includes Ziamet temperature and CoCoRaHS precipitation networks data and NM drought conditions.
DROUGHT
US Drought Monitor Current maps and time series of droughts. Estimates the percentage of row crops, livestock or speciality crops experiencing drought with links to crop progress. Offers condition and outlooks national maps on soil moisture, snowpack, streamflow, drought indexes and more. Maps showing the changes in drought conditions and North America Drought Monitor maps including Canada, the US and Mexico.
WILDFIRE
National Interagency Fire Center Current Wildland Fire Locations, Maps, Incident Management Situation Report, Statistics, Suppression Costs.
NASA/US Forest Service FIRMS map (left).
EPA Wildfire Indicators graphs include frequency, area burned, and damage in the U.S.
HEALTH & OTHER RISKS TRACKERS
Demographic Characteristics of Populations Living Near Oil and Gas Wells. Want to find out how many low-income people, people of color, children under 5 or other demographic groups live within a certain distance from oil and/or gas wells? This Environmental Defense Fund website can tell you that as well as how much these amounts differ from what is expected from the county as a whole.
AirNow.gov
a one-stop source for local, state, national and world air quality and wildfire data. An interactive map even lets you zoom out to get the big picture or drill down to see data for a single air quality monitor.
Heat.gov
contains links for several websites and tools including the CDC Heat and Health Tracker (heat illness and deaths each day-see map),
OSHA NIOSH Heat Safety Tool, Future Heat Events and Social Vulnerability Tool, and the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) webpage which has historical data on heat-related illness for different states.
ClimaWATCH (Climate and Weather Analytics, Trends and Community Health) tool from Mathematica facilitates community heat vulnerability assessments. The dynamic dashboard provides statistics and visualizations to (1) identify communities hardest hit by heatwaves; (2) assess which are most vulnerable to them based on demographic, social, environmental, and infrastructural features; and (3) quantify excess health service use and spending attributable to heatwaves. This is a wonderful tool, but health data like excess spending due to heat is limited in New Mexico because it depends on data from Medicaid beneficiaries who are not in managed care, which is only about 20% of New Mexico Medicaid recipients.
Heat-Related EMS Activation Surveillance Dashboard The Dashboard, created in partnership between the HHS Office of Climate Change and Health Equity and the DOT National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, uses nationally submitted Emergency Medical Services (EMS) data to track EMS responses to people experiencing heat-related emergencies in the pre-hospital setting. Also has information about EMS-related disparities by age, race, gender and urbanity.
CDC National Environmental Public Health Tracking Network provides a query panel on a broad range of data such as environmental justice, precipitation and flooding, air quality, asthma, drought, heat illnesses, drinking water, COPD, and community characteristics and vulnerabilities by state, county, time and other options. Climate change specific data sets.
Climate Mapping for Resilience and Adaptation displays climate-related hazards that affect U.S. communities every day. View real-time statistics and maps documenting where people, property, and infrastructure may be exposed to hazards.
New Mexico Environmental Public Health Tracking Program summarizes air quality and water quality data as well as environmental health outcomes such as asthma, myocardial infarction (heart attack), birth defects, reproductive outcomes, thyroid cancer, and leukemia. It includes studies on the linkage of ozone in air with asthma. It also provides warning systems based on real-time satellite data for wildfires, dust, heat waves, and other weather events.
FEMA National Risk Index Map
identifies communities most at risk to 18 natural hazards.
This application visualizes natural hazard risk metrics and includes data about expected annual losses from natural hazards, social vulnerability and community resilience.
US Climate Resilience Toolkit provides many tools to help manage climate-related risks and opportunities, and to build resilience to extreme events. Guide. Some links: Western Regional Climate Center. Rural Capacity Map. Climate Assessment of the Southwest.
Enter your address or state and Climate Check will give you an instant assessment of how climate change will affect your property in terms of flooding, fires, storms, drought, heat and other risks.