Stretching the predictive capabilities of climate models, researchers last week released an unprecedentedly detailed portrait of the impacts of long-term climate change on the United Kingdom.

The projections, produced by scientists at the Met Office and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, run to 2080. They map climate effects to a resolution of 25 square kilometres, and resolve some weather patterns down to a scale of 5 square kilometres.

"Current climate science might support projections on a scale of a couple of thousand kilometres, but anything smaller than that is uncharted territory," says University of Oxford climatologist Myles Allen, who was part of a review committee commissioned to check the report's methodology.

Regional projections were also recently produced for the United States at a resolution of 25 square kilometres, at decadal timescales up to 2039 (see Nature doi:10.1038/news.2009.518; 2009).