Historical and Projected Climate in the Northern Rockies Region

Climate influences the ecosystem services we obtain from forest and rangelands. An understanding of how climate may change in the future is needed to consider climate change in resource planning and management. In this chapter, we present the current understanding of the future changes in climate for the Northern Rockies region. Projected climate was derived from climate models in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project version 5 (CMIP5) database, which was used in the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports. Climate models project that the Earth’s current warming trend will continue throughout the twenty-first century in the Northern Rockies. Compared to observed historical temperature, average warming across the Northern Rockies is projected to be about 2–3 °C by 2050, depending on greenhouse gas emissions. Seasonally, projected winter maximum temperature begins to rise above freezing in the mid-twenty-first century in several parts of the region. Projections for precipitation suggest a slight increase in the future, but precipitation projections, in general, have much higher uncertainty than those for temperature.