Our Mission

Our mission is to make data portraying climate change in California more accessible and actionable for a broad audience, with an emphasis on energy sector stakeholders and local governments. We do this by:

  • Building tools for exploring and downloading high-quality, peer-reviewed climate data from California’s scientific and research community. Cal-Adapt presents research developed under California’s climate change assessments, with Cal-Adapt 2.0 focusing on California’s Fourth Climate Change Assessment, including datasets portraying sea level rise, wildfires, droughts, storms, and extreme heat events.
  • Designing tools and content to help users better understand climate data (via tooltips, Glossary and Cal-Adapt Blog) and learn best practices for working with climate projections (see our Get Started guide). We make it easy to share charts and tables of climate data with stakeholders and provide options for customizing data visualizations to meet sector specific requirements in some of our more technical tools.
  • Building a public Cal-Adapt API to empower researchers and developers to integrate climate data on Cal-Adapt into existing workflows and develop domain specific applications.
  • Engaging with and learning from our users through workshops, webinars and stakeholder outreach.

California is one of the most 'climate-challenged' regions of North America; its historical climate is extremely variable, and climate change is making extreme conditions more frequent and severe. California’s temperatures are already warming, heat waves are more frequent, and precipitation continues to be highly variable.

— A Summary of Key Findings from California’s Fourth Climate Change Assessment

Our Audience

Workshop at GIF

Cal-Adapt offers free public access to peer-reviewed data that support exploration of California’s climate change impacts on state infrastructure, communities, and natural resources. Our users include energy sector stakeholders, infrastructure managers, municipal planners, community-based organizations, state agencies, scientists and climate experts, educators, and interested participants from the general public.

Workshop at GIF

Cal-Adapt Leadership

Funding and Oversight

logo for California Energy Commission California Energy Commission

Programmatic Lead

logo for Eagle Rock Analytics Eagle Rock Analytics

The California Energy Commission will develop the Cal-Adapt Web site that will synthesize existing California climate change scenarios and climate impact research and to encourage its use in a way that is beneficial for local decision-makers.

— A key recommendation of the 2009 California Climate Adaptation Strategy

Our Roadmap

The California Energy Commission (CEC) and UC Berkeley’s Geospatial Innovation Facility (GIF) initially released Cal-Adapt to the public in 2011 as a web-based resource to showcase the innovative climate change research being produced by the scientific community in California, as recommended in the 2009 California Climate Adaptation Strategy.

The GIF, with funding support from the CEC, developed and launched the current iteration of Cal-Adapt (version 2.0) as part of California’s Fourth Climate Change Assessment. This version includes updates and enhancements that increase its ease of use, information value, interactive visualizations, and data accessibility. Cal-Adapt's design and functionality have been developed in collaboration with a variety of beta testers and advisory committee members who provided valuable feedback throughout several iterations of updates.

Cal-Adapt is evolving substantially, expanding beyond its current capabilities to support California’s Fifth Climate Change Assessment and offer a more comprehensive and powerful solution for highly technical and data-intensive needs, with a focus on the energy sector. The expanded Cal-Adapt enterprise will continue to provide essential visualization, analytical and computational resources to support a broad range of stakeholders in using large climate datasets to inform their decision-making and planning processes. For additional details on state agency vision and roles in this expanded enterprise, please see this CEC Staff memo.

caladapt roadmap
Evolution of the Cal-Adapt enterprise

Cal-Adapt has been recognized by California’s legislature as a key resource to support local hazard mitigation efforts and has helped California move forward on climate policy by providing easy access and exploration of high-resolution, regionally downscaled climate projections that are sanctioned by the state to be used in climate adaptation resiliency and planning. The website continues to evolve to present the latest scientific data and to further support stakeholders in understanding climate-related impacts relevant to local decision making.

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Read our technical report for the Fourth Assessment for more detailed information on the background and development of Cal-Adapt.

Disclaimer: This website was prepared as a result of work sponsored by the California Energy Commission (CEC) and the California Strategic Growth Council (SGC). It does not necessarily represent the views of the CEC, SGC, the agencies' employees or the State of California. The CEC, SGC, the State of California, its employees, contractors and subcontractors make no warranty, express or implied, and assume no legal liability for the information on this website or made available via the website; nor does any party represent that the use of this information will not infringe upon privately owned rights. The website has not been approved or disapproved by the CEC or SGC, nor has the CEC or SGC passed upon the accuracy or adequacy of the information on the website.