The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change publishes a report on the consensus view of climate change science about every five to seven years. The first findings of the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) were released on Sept. 27, 2013, in the form of the Summary for Policymakers report and a draft of IPCC Working Group 1's Physical Science Basis. The IPCC does not perform new science but instead authors a report that establishes the established understanding of the world's climate science community.
The report not only includes observations of the real world but also the results of climate model projections of how the Earth will respond as a system to rising greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. The IPCC's AR5 relies on the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) effort, an international effort among the climate modeling community to coordinate climate change experiments.
These visualizations represent the mean output of how certain groups of CMIP5 models responded to four different scenarios called Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs). These four RCPs – 2.6, 4.5, 6 and 8.5 – represent a wide range of potential worldwide greenhouse gas emissions and sequestration scenarios for the coming century. The pathways are numbered based on the expected Watts per square meter – essentially a measure of how much heat energy is being trapped by the climate system – each scenario would produce. The pathways are partly based on the ultimate concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The current carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is around 400 parts per million, up from less than 300 parts per million at the end of the 19th century.
The carbon dioxide concentrations in the year 2100 for each RCP are:
RCP 2.6: 421 ppm
RCP 4.5: 538 ppm
RCP 6: 670 ppm
RCP 8.5: 936 ppm
Each visualization represents the mean output of a different number of models for each RCP, because data from all models in the CMIP5 project was not available in the same format for visualization for each RCP. All of the models compare a projection of precipitation changes from 2006-2099 to a baseline historical average from 1971-2000.
Thus, the values shown for each year represent the departure for that year compared to the observed average precipitation from 1971-2000. 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For the IPCC's Physical Science Basis and Summary for Policymakers reports, scientists referenced an international climate modeling effort to study how the Earth might respond to four different scenarios of how much carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases would be emitted into the atmosphere throughout the 21st century. The Summary for Policymakers, the first official piece of the group's Fifth Assessment Report, was released Fri., Sept. 27.That modeling effort, called the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5), includes dozens of climate models from institutions around the world, including from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.To produce visualizations that show temperature and precipitation changes similar to those included in the IPCC report, the NASA Center for Climate Simulation calculated mean model results for each of the four emissions scenarios. The final products are visual representations how much temperature and precipitation patterns would change through 2100 compared to the historical average from the end of the 20th century. The changes shown compare the model projections to the average temperature and precipitation benchmarks observed from 1971-2000. This baseline is different from the IPCC report, which uses a 1986-2005 baseline. Because the reference period from 1986-2005 was slightly warmer than 1971-2000, the visualizations are slightly different than those in the report, even though the same model data is used. || ", "release_date": "2013-09-27T08:00:00-04:00", "update_date": "2025-05-20T00:17:11.898374-04:00", "main_image": { "id": 461912, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a011300/a011376/G2013-080_IPCC_viz00136_print.jpg", "filename": "G2013-080_IPCC_viz00136_print.jpg", "media_type": "Image", "alt_text": "Climate models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimate global temperature and precipitation patterns will change throughout the 21st century given current rising greenhouse gas concentrations. This visualization is based on a scenario in which carbon dioxide concentrations reach 670 parts per million by 2100, up from around 400 ppm today. Credit: NASA Center for Climate Simulation/Scientific Visualization StudioFor complete transcript, click here.This video is also available on our YouTube channel.", "width": 1024, "height": 576, "pixels": 589824 } } ], "sources": [], "products": [], "newer_versions": [], "older_versions": [], "alternate_versions": [] }