23 November 2011: The World Bank has launched a new Climate Change Knowledge Portal as part of its Open Data Initiative, which links users to over 250 climate indicators and includes visualization tools depicting temperature and rainfall scenarios to the year 2100.

The portal also publicizes a three-month competition – Apps for Climate – scheduled to kick off in December at the UN Climate Change Conference in Durban, South Africa, to encourage scientists, software developers, and others to create applications that use the wealth of climate data being made available to help solve the development problems posed by climate change.

The portal, competition, and data are part of a new effort to make climate data more accessible and useful, while complementing a push for the practical application of climate change research. [Climate Change Knowledge Portal] [Open Data Initiative]