How hot cities could be in 2050
Many of the world’s cities will face sharply different climates by 2050. I tried to visualize how climate change will affect world cities. I chose 6,000 cities and examined the current climate of every town using the Global Environmental Stratification based on modeling future climate conditions as predicted by 63 of the emission scenario combinations.
The Global Environmental Stratification is a globally consistent classification of land into comparatively homogenous units, based upon a statistical clustering of climate variables (Metzger et al., 2013). It was realized in support of the Biodiversity Observation Network to provide a framework for analyzing ecological and environmental data over large heterogeneous areas.
Based on high-resolution geospatial monthly climate datasets averaged from 1960 to 2000, the Global Environmental Stratification describes current conditions to stratify the earth into 125 strata, aggregated into 18 zones.
