Want a better idea of your future climate? Try this map

Enlarge (credit: Alan Levine)

Absent a time machine, it’s hard to truly wrap your head around what the future climate will be like. Climate projection numbers carry a lot of information, but those numbers can seem abstract—what does 2.5º warmer actually feel like?

One way to understand that information is to hop in the car (even if it’s not a DeLorean). There are a huge variety of local climates around the world, and it’s possible to find a location today that ought to feel a lot like your hometown will in a few decades. A new study by Matt Fitzpatrick and Rob Dunn applies this “climate analog” approach to 540 cities in the US and Canada—which means about 250 million people can use a Web map to look for an analog to their future climate.

Present and future climates

There are multiple ways you could imagine defining such a comparison. In this case, the researchers broke the data down by season, calculating minimum/maximum temperatures and total precipitation averaged over 1960-1990. This is basically the seasonal weather you’re used to.