George Mason’s Virginia Climate Center Releases First-ever Statewide Climate Assessment
Cover of the First Virginia Climate Assessment, Virginia Climate Center–George Mason University
George Mason University’s Virginia Climate Center (VCC) has unveiled the commonwealth’s first comprehensive, peer-reviewed climate assessment—a landmark report that provides science-based insights into Virginia’s changing climate and its impacts on communities, infrastructure, and the economy.
This report marks the inaugural comprehensive assessment of climate conditions across the Commonwealth of Virginia. While Virginia’s diverse weather and climate patterns have been examined in both local and broader national and global contexts, no prior effort has synthesized the wealth of scholarly research specific to Virginia into a unified resource.
The Virginia Climate Assessment provides a science-based evaluation of the ways past, current, and anticipated climates have and will impact Virginia and its people. As the first report of its kind for the state, it provides a collection of evidence-based key messages that have been prepared and extensively reviewed
by technical and scientific experts across Virginia and beyond. It is expected to be the first in a series of such assessments, establishing a baseline against which future changes and impacts can be measured and understood, and adaptation effectiveness and resilience can be evaluated.
An executive summary for busy readers and the VCA’s top findings.
KEY MESSAGES
1. Virginia’s climate is shaped by weather patterns stemming from higher and lower latitudes, while regional variation reflects topography and coastal
proximity (high confidence).
2.The Virginia climate has become warmer (very high confidence) and wetter (medium confidence) in recent decades, with greater precipitation extremes
(high confidence) and more frequent tidal flooding (very high confidence) along the Atlantic coast.
3.Climate projections indicate continued warming (very high confidence) and wetting (medium confidence) for Virginia through the middle to late 21st century, with chronic tidal flooding along the Atlantic coast (very high confidence).
The Virginia Climate Assessment is intended to be used to inform climate adaptation plans, resilience strategies, and policy decisions, and provide evidence for developing targeted responses to climate impacts. Key Messages can be used to identify areas of critical need for strategic planning, provide supporting evidence for budget proposals, and outline potential directions for policy development or climate action planning.
