UTCDW A climate downscaling workflow for engineering analysis

About/Team

About UTCDW

The University of Toronto Climate Downscaling Workflow (UTCDW) is a tool to help upper-level undergraduate students, graduate students, and early career practitioners in engineering assess the impacts of climate change on civil infrastructure. It consists of 

  • A Guidebook that provides background and training in the methods of climate analysis relevant to this area, and 
  • A Survey in which users create a flowchart that represents the key design steps in their analysis that can be edited and revised as the user’s project gets defined.

UTCDW provides guidance on a wide range of methods of climate downscaling, a set of techniques used to relate available climate information (e.g. weather station data, model output) to the requirements of engineering (site specific information, design requirements), while accounting for issues related to sampling, biases, and uncertainty. While UTCDW is designed to be self-contained, references and resources are available to explore many aspects of this exciting topic in more depth.

To get started, please Visit the Guidebook and practice working with the Survey. The latter requires registration so that UTCDW can retain a record of your survey. This way, you can review it, update it, and create new surveys based on it. Besides yourself, your surveys will be viewed only by the UTCDW team listed below, for the purposes of development of the site and assessing its effectiveness.

Please feel free to drop us a line and provide feedback via the Feedback form.

The UTCDW Team

  • Project directors: Paul Kushner and Karen Smith
  • Guidebook and curriculum design, content development, technical implementation: Michael Morris
  • Website creation, coding, and support: Julian Comanean
  • Technical testing, design feedback: Aleksandra Elias Chereque, Lilian Chan, and Cassandra Chanen

Sponsorship and Support

The UTCDW was developed under the auspices of the University of Toronto’s Centre for Climate Science and Engineering (uoftcse.ca) and Climate Positive Energy (cpe.utoronto.ca). Lilian Chan was supported in an internship from the Data Sciences Institute (datasciences.utoronto.ca). We acknowledge the ongoing support and expertise of these centres in helping us set up and promote this resource.