A review on the development of climatic scenarios related to policy-oriented assessment of the impact of climatic variations is presented. It seeks to provide background information needed to evaluate the extent to which existing regional scenarios have utility in the above context, and whether and how such utility could be increased in the future. An appraisal of alternative approaches (both GCM and empirically based) that have been used to develop scenarios from the standpoints of their respective motivations, the methods employed, the acknowledged strengths (both present and potential) and weaknesses, the results obtained, and the credibility of those results is given. Types of research needed to make regional climatic scenarios of greater utility for the policy-oriented assessment of the impact of climatic variations are suggested.
1 Also affiliated with the Department of Atmospheric Sciences, The University of Illinois, Urbana, Ill.
