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CLIMATE CHANGE ALBERTAS BIODIVERSITY 13 11 IPCC. 2000. Summary for policy makers. In Special Report on Emissions Scenarios for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 27 pp. Available at httpswww.ipcc.chpdfspecial-reportsspmsres-en.pdf 12 Meehl G.A. et al. 2007. The WCRP CMIP3 multimodel dataset A new era in climate change research. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 881383-1394. 13 See 11. GLOBAL CLIMATE MODELS A complementary suite of global climate models represents the range of potential future climate conditions in Alberta. Many BMCCA projects employed global climate models GCMs to predict future climatic conditions in Alberta. Global climate models have been developed by internationally renowned research centres across the globe to provide projections of global climate under a suite of greenhouse gas emissions scenarios. These scenarios based on assumptions about future global economic technological and social development represent future atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations.11 The predictions from these models are variable and there is no consensus on which models are best for particular research questions or regions of interest. Selecting among the various GCMs and emissions scenarios to represent future conditions in Alberta is a complex task. Diana Stralberg 2012 identified a set of five GCMs from the World Climate Research Project WCRP Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 3 CMIP312 as a complementary suite of models to represent the range of potential future climate outcomes for Alberta including both wetter and drier climate scenarios Table 1. The BMCCA project typically relied on either ensemble data generated by averaging across a suite of GCMs for a single greenhouse gas scenario or comparisons among projections from two or more of the identified GCMs and greenhouse gas emissions scenarios to represent the uncertainty associated with projected future conditions. The A2 greenhouse gas emissions scenario which is characterized by regionally oriented economic development and a continuously increasing population and consequently projects continuously increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations13 was the most commonly used scenario. TABLE 1. Acomplementarysuiteofglobalclimatemodelsthatrepresent arangeofpotentialend-of-centuryclimateoutcomesfor AlbertaStralberg2012. Global Climate Model Future Projection ECHAM5MPI-OM Germany Most representative of all models for the Alberta region INM-CM3.0 Russia Wetter CGCM3.1T47 Canada Wetter less seasonal GFDL-CM2.1 USA Drier UKMO-HadGEM1 UK Drier much warmer