Your Future Climate Twin

If you want to know how climate change will affect New York City in 60 years time you just need to travel to Arkansas today. In the town of Ola, Arkansas you can experience today the climate that New York is expected to have in 2080, when summer temperatures will be 12.1°F warmer and 5.3% wetter.

The concept of climate analogs is often used in climate science to describe a location whose current climate is similar to the projected future climate of another location. The idea is employed to help people understand the potential impacts of climate change by comparing familiar climates to projected ones. A new interactive web map developed by the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science enables you to discover the climate analogs of 40,581 locations and 5,323 metro areas worldwide.

Enter your location into Future Urban Climates and you can discover your climate twin. The location today that has a climate which is the most similar to the climate in your town in 2080. The future climate analogs generated by the map are based on "high and reduced emissions scenarios, as well as for several different climate forecast models".

The use of climate analogs has become an established tool to help explain the dangers of global heating. Just last month The Pudding published its Climate Zones map. The Pudding's Climate Zones - How Will Your City Feel in the Future? explains the current climate zones of 70 global cities and the climate zones that they will experience after global heating.  The map allows you to select a city, observe it moving into its future climate zone and learn how average temperatures in the city will be changed by global heating.

You can also explore climate analogs in the National Geographic's Your Climate Changed (an interactive map showing the future climate analogs of 2,500 cities around the world), on the Analog Atlas (2050 climate analogs based on two different climate change predictions), and on the Summer of 2080 Will Be This Warm map (using global heating scenarios of 4.2 degrees or 1.8 degrees centigrade).