SENSES Toolkit by UCLAB / FH Potsdam

The overall aim of the SENSES Toolkit — available under climatescenarios.org — is to make climate change scenarios more understandable, accessible, and usable.

Climate change scenarios are a powerful tool for describing how global climate will change in the next decades. They allow us to explore possible climate futures, chart response strategies, and inform climate policy making.

Our goal was to provide current and potential climate scenario users with practical tools and visualisations that would allow them to productively include current scenarios in their own work. We wanted to enable our stakeholders to literally see the impact and implications of the climate change scenarios and to generate actionable insights.

Throughout the entire SENSES Toolkit, visualisation design played an important role. We use visualisation techniques to explain how models work, we use them for comparing scenarios, and we use visualisation interfaces for designing access to the scenario database. The visual design creates a contextual bridge between general scenario knowledge and the complex scenario space of the database.