US EPA
United States Environmental Protection Agency
Locating and Selecting Scenarios Online
The LASSO tool guides you step-by-step through the process of identifying and downloading climate change scenarios—or projections—that are relevant to your interest or research question. At each step you will define criteria that will subset climate change information from a much larger archive, with LASSO providing helpful information and suggestions along the way. At the end of the process you will have the option to download maps, figures and GIS-ready spatial data, or use an interactive scatterplot widget to customize or change your choices. You can find supporting documentation for the LASSO tool here.
In just a few minutes, you can have customized maps, scatterplots, and spatial data downloaded to your desktop.
Study Area
Data Source
Emissions Pathway
Climate Variables
First, LASSO will guide you through a step-by-step process to select the datasets that will be useful to you. LASSO will guide you through a step-by-step process that identifies datasets most relevant to you. LASSO will provide helpful explanations and suggestions along the way.
Select your study area, either an EPA Region or one of the contiguous United States.
Select the LOCA or BCSD dataset.
Choose either a high or moderate emissions pathway.
Specify your climate variables, such as temperature, time of year, and time period.
Once you've defined your criteria, the LASSO tool creates an interactive scatterplot of scenarios.
LASSO provides four strategies to help you identify a subset of useful climate projections. Your selections are highlighted to help you visually assess your choices.
After you've finalized your selections, you have the option of downloading scatterplots, maps, and spatial data.
This scatterplot of all climate scenarios – not just your final selections – may serve as a useful reference down the road.
This figure puts your final climate projection choices into context at a glance.
You'll have access to maps of every climate variable from every scenario you selected for your study area.
You can also download raster files for every climate variable from every scenario you selected, refined to your study area. The files are in GeoTIFF format and compatible with any modern GIS or mapping application.
