Community Toolkit

The Gulf of Maine Council’s Climate Network has assembled resources useful to municipalities in their work on climate mitigation and adaptation. In addition to the resources here, visit the NExUS database (www.neclimateus.org) to do geographic or topical searches of climate-related studies, adaptation plans and action plans from the Gulf of Maine region and beyond. A fact sheet with more details about NExUS is available here (PDF, < 1 mb).

Climate-related Informational Databases and Resource Sites

Interactive Maps, Models and Tools

  • NOAA’s Sea-Level Rise Viewer (US only) offers the capacity to depict potential future sea levels along coastlines, providing a zoom function to center in on targeted areas and a slider to illustrate inundation with 1-, 3- and 6-foot increases in sea level.
  • New Hampshire’s Coastal Viewer (NH only): This tool provides Seacoast New Hampshire communities with data to help visualize areas most vulnerable to coastal hazards. See for more details.
  • Maine Geological Survey Potential Hurricane Inundation Map (Maine only) shows mean and high tide inundation extent for Category 1 through 4 hurricanes.
  • New Brunswick Climate Futures offers maps and explanatory text to explore potential climate changes up to the year 2100.
  • The University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute provides a “Climate Reanalyzer” provides perspective on climate and weather changes since the late 1800s, and offers ways to compare current weather against long-term averages.

Guidance on Assessing Vulnerability and Adaptation Planning

For more guidance and planning documents involving climate change adaptation in the Gulf of Maine region, please search NOAA’s NExUS database by topic or region.

For Training Videos, click here

  • Precipitation from extreme events in the GOM region has increased 74 percent since 1958 (NOAA).
  • Extreme weather already poses economic and ecological challenges, and these events are expected to grow more frequent in coming decades, with precipitation increasing 5-9 percent (IPCC 2013).
Credit: Sherry Godlewski

Credit: Sherry Godlewski

  • By 2050, climate scientists project a more rapid increase of 2.5 to 3.5°C (4.5 to 6.3° F) in regional air temperature (IPCC 2013).
  • Temperatures in the Gulf of Maine have risen much more in recent decades than many other coastal waters around the world, and a 2012 “heat wave” in sea surface temperatures had damaging economic impacts.
Projected Temperature Changes in the Gulf of Maine Region by the 2050s (°C.), reflecting the most recent IPCC models (Credit: Adam Fenech, UPEI Climate Lab)

Projected Temperature Changes in the Gulf of Maine Region by the 2050s (°C.), reflecting the most recent IPCC models (Credit: Adam Fenech, UPEI Climate Lab)

What’s Climate Change and What’s Just the Weather?

This one-minute animation by Ole Christoffer Haga, produced by Teddy TV for the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, clearly and humorously illustrates the difference between long-term climate trends and variable weather patterns.