Additional Guidance for Step 2

What do we do if we don’t have local data management or GIS capabilities?

If your agency or community does not have access to programs like ArcGIS or other spatial analysis software, you are not out of luck. While spatially explicit planning is useful it isn’t always necessary depending on the scale and scope of the plan you are working to complete. If you do pursue that more spatially explicit approach, several resources can help supplement these needs.

• Contact the State: As recommended in the DOLA Planning for Hazards website, it might be useful to reach out to the Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, whose work is heavily involved in mapping and data sources relevant to this work.
• Use the tools referenced above to generate maps. Many of the tools allow you to customize visualizations and export maps for free.
• Contact the Department of Geography at your nearest university or college: In general, students in the geospatial sciences are always looking for research projects and meaningful community service. In addition, organizations like the Colorado State University Geospatial Centroid are well suited to assist learners with the GIS data acquisition, management, and visualization process.
• Explore the CRO website to discover current and future weather and climate risks and other challenges.

How do I establish a collaborative relationship with a university or research entity to help with this work?

Start by asking. Check with your Core team as they may already have existing relationships with a local or regional university. Any department that is relevant to your planning approach may be eager to have “real world” opportunities to collect or share data, conduct analysis, or participate in a planning process. Also, check with the Western Water Assessment (one of NOAA’s Regionally Integrated Sciences and Assessment Centers) at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

How do I find out if other organizations are doing work relevant to this effort?

Reach out to the CRO or look through the case studies on this website. Also, use the peer exchange to see what other communities are doing similar planning efforts. The CRO also annually updates this list of climate and resilience-related plans in Colorado.

How do I determine which climate change modeling data to use?

Climate science is always changing so check with the CRO, the Western Water Assessment, or neighboring communities to see what scenarios they are using for their planning efforts.

Everything I find about climate change is at the state level, but I know my local community’s weather and climate are somewhat unique. Are there resources that can give a more meaningful picture of what my community may face?

Colorado’s large size, unique topography, and resulting diversity in local weather and climate mean that state-wide assessments mostly account for broad impactful processes and events. There are two main ways to deal with this issue:

1. Learn from and build institutional knowledge from past events. Using local experiences of extreme weather events, droughts, flash floods, and other localized occurrences build a set of scenarios to help to frame what increased intensity from these types of phenomena might bring to your community. In some cases, this may mean looking at work undertaken by neighbors who deal with similar local-scale weather formation and climate factors.
2. Use downscaled climate change projection data. Statistical downscaling of climate data and projection model outputs is another approach that has been increasingly utilized in planning to prepare for future events. Luckily, numerous resources are available in Colorado to assist planners with this process through Colorado’s university networks. Contacts at the Colorado Climate Center can help to point you towards which resource might be the best for your situation. Additional Colorado organizations with known downscaling climate data and local scenario development experience include:
   • Western Water Assessment
   • National Center for Atmospheric Research / University Corporation for Atmospheric Research at CU Boulder
   • Colorado Natural Heritage Program
   • Center for Collaborative Conservation
   • Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory
   • North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center

For those interested in GIS Data of downscaled climate projection data, AdaptWest and the Conservation Biology Institute provide resources.

Great job! 

You have completed Step 2. 

Onward to Step 3.