EPA Dynamically Downscaled Ensemble (EDDE): Datasets for Adaptation and Resilience Planning for Environmental...

The EPA Dynamically Downscaled Ensemble (EDDE) is a collection of physics-based regional climate model output that projects the impacts of climate change across the United States to support strategic development, adaptation, and resilience planning for a sustainable future. EDDE consists of dynamically downscaled global climate model simulations for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries under various forcing scenarios. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency began development of EDDE to quantify the effects of climate change on air quality and human health, which required a breadth of data that were not routinely archived or publicly available. EDDE uses the WRF Model to downscale global climate simulations over most of North America. Uniquely among regional climate datasets, the EDDE archive includes hourly, 3D data from continuous simulations of recent historical periods and future years through 2100. EDDE is suitable for exploring regional climate variability and change and its influence on extreme weather events across the United States to quantify potential impacts on environmental endpoints, such as air quality and human health, pollutant deposition to sensitive ecosystems, stormwater management, and phenological indicators important for agriculture. EDDE data were used in the Air Quality chapter of the Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA4), and the next generation of EDDE is poised for broad use in NCA6. A subset of variables from EDDE is now freely available via the Amazon Web Services Open Data Project. This paper describes the history, evolution, applications, availability, and future of EDDE, alongside the evolving needs of regional climate datasets to support decision-making.