Managers and climate impacts researchers face multiple pain points when trying to use climate projection data: discovery, access, and usage. There are multiple global climate model repositories (CMIP3, CMIP5), multiple downscaling techniques (MACA, BCSD, LOCA), and multiple file formats. Each product has different spatio-temporal resolutions, different climate variables, and different limitations. 

The Climate Futures Toolbox (CFT), a seamless R-code workflow, allows users to access downscaled climate data (MACA v2) at daily timescale for a given shapefile and selected variables and climate projections to support climate scenario planning activities. The output from CFT includes climate data as GeoTIFF and XML metadata file.

This tool was developed by the North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center in collaboration with the National Park Service's Climate Change Response Program.

The CFT package allows users to:

• Quickly acquire climate data subsets for a spatial region of interest,
• Summarize climate data at daily timesteps, and compute derived quantities,
• Contrast reference and target time periods to understand differences in climate over time, and
• Easily work with climate data, without having to worry about the details of how it is stored or formatted.