Copernicus Climate Data Store: ready for application in adaptation case studies? – experiences of the training workshop in Hungary

As basis of climate change adaptation, good quality climate data and information is required, however, they are very often costly or difficult to access. The Climate Data Store (CDS) developed within Copernicus Climate Change Service aims to bridge the gap between data providers and users by ensuring a freely available, quality-assured information about the past, present and future climate. In order to make users familiar with the CDS, a national training event was organized in Hungary that contained two online webinars and a face-to-face workshop (October 2019). Researchers, lecturers, consultants and stakeholders from the field of agriculture, forestry, water management and environmental engineering have learned how climate data can be properly selected, analyzed and interpreted to address their climate change adaptation challenges. For their own adaptation case studies they tested the applicability of CDS and discussed the experiences in multidisciplinary teams.

Main feedbacks of the participants are:

• The concept of CDS is welcome and relevant to their work. Provided climate variables are easily accessible and well documented.
• For sectoral application, the country specific adaptation issues would require high spatial resolution (regional and local scale time series) and bias corrected model results instead of the currently available GCM outputs.
• The Toolbox associated with the CDS should be more user friendly. At the moment (October 2019) high programming skills are essential to derive praxis-based extreme indices and create country-scale maps and graphs.
• The e-learning material on the Learning Experience Platform contains carefully structured background knowledge to the sources, characteristics and proper application of climate data.

Further toolbox improvements driven by the user needs and the ongoing development of Sectoral Information Systems will significantly increase the applicability of the CDS for climate risk analyses and adaptation support in Hungary.

 

Acknowledgements: the training event was supported by the European Union Copernicus Climate Change Service and the Hungarian Meteorological Service.