Identifying climatic analogs for Wisconsin under 21st-century climate-change scenarios Samuel Veloz & John W. Williams & David Lorenz & Michael Notaro & Steve Vavrus & Daniel J. Vimont Received: 20 April 2010 / Accepted: 31 August 2011 # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011 Abstract There is a deep disconnect between scientific and public concern about climate change. One reason is that global climate change is a fairly abstract concept with little perceived relevance, so a key challenge is to translate climate-change projections into locally concrete examples of potential impacts. Here we use climate analog analyses as an alternative method for identifying and communicating climate-change impacts. Our analysis uses multiple downscaled general circulation models for the state of Wisconsin, at 0.1 decimal degree resolution, and identifies contemporary locations in North America that are the most similar to the projected future climates for Wisconsin. We assess the Climatic Change DOI 10.1007/s10584-011-0261-z Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10584-011-0261-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. S. Veloz (*) : J. W. Williams Department of Geography, Center for Climatic Research, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA e-mail: sveloz@prbo.org J. W. Williams e-mail: jww@geography.wisc.edu D. Lorenz : M. Notaro : S. Vavrus Center for Climatic Research, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA D. Lorenz e-mail: dlorenz@wisc.edu M. Notaro e-mail: mnotaro@wisc.edu S. Vavrus e-mail: sjvavrus@wisc.edu D. J. Vimont Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, Center for Climatic Research, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA e-mail: dvimont@wisc.edu Present Address: S. Veloz PRBO Conservation Science, Petaluma, CA, USA