Speaker: Dr. Claire Schollaert, UCLA Fielding School of Public Health
Downscaled climate projections provide valuable information with which to better understand the impacts of climate change on public health outcomes and to inform adaptation and mitigation strategies at local to regional scales. Yet, because downscaling approaches vary in their representations of fine-scale spatiotemporal patterns, epidemiologic analyses need to consider how differences across models and approaches impact projections of health impacts into the future.
In this seminar, Dr. Schollaert presents an evaluation of how the seasonality of coccidioidomycosis (Valley fever) in California may shift in response to future temperature and precipitation patterns. These projections are based on global climate models from CMIP6, downscaled using both dynamical and hybrid statistical approaches featured in California’s Fifth Climate Change Assessment.
Schollaert compares how the choice of downscaling technique influences future projections of the coccidioidomycosis transmission season and will discuss broader implications for the use of downscaled climate data in health-related climate impact studies.