Strengthening forecasts of climate change impacts with multi-model ensemble averaged projections using MAGICC/SCENGEN 5.3

Climate output from general circulation models (GCMs) is being used with increasing frequency to explore potential climate change impacts on species' distributional range shifts and extinction probability. However, different GCMs do not perform equally well in their ability to hindcast the key climatic factors that potentially influence species distributions. Previous research has demonstrated that multi-model ensemble forecasts perform better than any single GCM in simulating observed conditions at a global scale. MAGICC/SCENGEN 5.3 is a freeware climate model 'emulator' that generates multi-model ensemble forecasts, conditional on regional and/or global performance, for up to twenty GCMs. In combination with a new application 'M/SGridder', this software can be used to produce down-scaled ensemble forecasts, which minimize climate-model-related uncertainty, for a range of ecological problems. © 2011 The Authors.Damien A. Fordham, Tom M. L. Wigley, Michael J. Watts and Barry W. Broo