Because the quality and yield of wine grapes are very sensitive to weather, vineyards are already being affected by global warming and its impacts will become even greater over the next several decades. This presentation outlines how growers and producers can use analyses produced by Argos Analytics to anticipate those impacts, enabling them to plan for the future.

This presentation describes a study of future coastal flooding risks, taking into account sea level rise and changes in precipitation patterns due to global warming, for the City of Del Mar in Southern California that was conducted by Environmental Science Associates, the Scripps Institute and Argos Analytics.

Changes in future precipitation patterns due to global warming will result in increased drainage requirements in many locations, while also influencing the optimal capacity for rainfall harvesting systems. This presentation by Arup and Argos Analytics describes tools for taking these effects into account in the design of drainage infrastructure and rainfall harvesting systems.

This research investigates projecting and ‘morphing’ weather files for building energy simulations in order to calculate lifetime energy consumption. Multiple weather-file modification tools and morphing methodologies have been developed over the last couple of decades to account for variable climate patterns.

Weather files provide hourly times series of weather variables for a typical year based on historical observations, and are widely used for modeling energy use and human comfort in the built environment. However, since they are based on historical data, they are increasingly inaccurate tools for estimating the future performance of buildings and communities, especially those with lifetimes exceeding 30 years. A “morphing” technique has been used by Arup to transform historical weather data based on projected changes in key weather variables provided by Argos Analytics.

In November 2012, Argos and the Bay Area Joint Policy Committee (JPC) agreed to do a pilot project to demonstrate how the TRACE™ system can be used for assessing regional climate risks. For those who aren’t familiar with the JPC, it is a coordinating body for the four Bay Area regional agencies: the Association of Bay Area Governments, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, the Bay Conservation and Development Commission and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission.

Even though there is still debate in the political arena, there is overwhelming consensus in the scientific community that climate change is real. This consensus is based on multiple bodies of scientific evidence that have been exhaustively reviewed in a series of assessments conducted by both national and international bodies, including the leading U.S. scientific societies.

The Physical Sciences working group of the IPCC Fifth Assessment released their Summary for Policymakers on September 27, 2013. This white paper provides an overview of its findings, including the evidence for climate change to date, projections for climate change during the rest of the 21st century and an estimate of how much more carbon can be released into the atmosphere without triggering what the international community considers "dangerous" climate chang