Displays

This years marks the end of the first delegation agreement between the Eurpean Commission and ECMWF for the implementation of the Copernicus Climate Change Service. In the last five years the service was first established, then opened the Climate Data Store and finally became operational attracting the attention of over 30.000 users from all over the world who access tens of global dataset and dowload data at a rate of 50 TB/day to develop climate services.

The paper presents the current status of the implementation of the programme and illustrate some of the options -including changes in the portfolio of the programme- that are currently being considered for the evolution of the service in the future.

How to cite: Buontempo, C.: C3S: current status and future plans, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-19725, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-19725, 2020.

This C3S service provides various observational surface in-situ datasets for Europe. Its core builds on the European Climate Assessment and Dataset (ECA&D) and the gridded E-OBS daily datasets for Europe. The pan-European E-OBS datasets for temperature, precipitation and sea level pressure are now available as ensemble datasets. Additional gridded datasets for other Essential Climate Variables are developed, like global radiation, wind speed and relative humidity. Next to the pan-European datasets, regional datasets for the Nordic, Alpine and Carphatian regions are available.

Climate monitoring products such as the indices defined by the Expert Team on Climate Change Detection and Indices (ETCCDI) are
available. Within this service, uncertainty estimates are provided as well for the pan-European datasets and indices.

All the information from these datasets and indices will flow into monthly State of the Climate reports which are available around the
25th of the next month from the dedicated portal for this service. The annual State of the Climate reports are created more centrally within
C3S and this service provides input for that report as well.

How to cite: van den Besselaar, E., van der Schrier, G., Tveito, O. E., Isotta, F., Jones, P., Chimani, B., Lakatos, M., Bissolli, P., and Stepanek, P.: Climate monitoring products for Europe based on Surface in-situ Observations, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-21808, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-21808, 2020.

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.

How to cite: Gálos, B. and Lehoczky, A.: Copernicus Climate Data Store: ready for application in adaptation case studies? – experiences of the training workshop in Hungary, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-7417, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-7417, 2020.

Meteorological conditions determine the viability and competitiveness of socio-economic activities of any territory for many sectors, like those earmarked as priority areas in the Global Framework for Climate Services (GFCS). Yet, although the tourist sector is not one of those, the INDECIS project does include it.

Climate services, understood as the transmission of processed information from meteorological and climatological data in a way that becomes useful for the end-user in the decision-making process, should be useful to trigger actions that adapt tourism activity to long-term trends and sudden changes of the competitive context, or else mitigate the effects that tourism generates on climatic conditions.

In the framework of INDECIS project, researchers have been carried out different workshops for co-designing climate services in five European tourism destinations. The destination cases have the purpose of responding to the design of climate services taking into account the participation of different stakeholders in vulnerable destinations to Climate Change.  As the main output, it has been developed different sectoral tourism indexes, which allow defining the optimum conditions to carry out tourism activities (snow tourism, sun & beach tourism, cultural tourism and outdoor tourism).

The present research shows the preliminary results of the INDECIS Snow tourism Index (ISTI) through the case study of Jacetania’s County (Aragon Pyrenees).  The ISTI has been co-created with the participation of local stakeholders, the Destination Management Organization (DMO), companies and end-users. Meanwhile, the economic value has been tested with tourism data from the destination, specifically offer and supply regarding the snow tourism activities. 

In this sense, the STI is made of three-dimensional perspectives: definition of meteorological conditions that condicionate the snow tourism (1), inclusion of other local variables, such as accessibility, infrastructures and characteristics of the ski stations (2), and consideration of the dynamics and seasonality of the destination (3). The first facet is essential for all users while the second facet is giving value specifically to skiers and the third facet is very useable as a planning tool for DMOs.

Acknowledgments: INDECIS is part of ERA4CS, an ERA-NET initiated by JPI Climate, and funded by FORMAS (SE), DLR (DE), BMWFW (AT), IFD (DK), MINECO (ES), ANR (FR) with co-funding by the European Union Grant 690462).

How to cite: Olano Pozo, J. X., Boqué Ciurana, A., Font Barnet, A., Russo, A., Saladié Borraz, Ò., Anton-Clavé, S., and Aguilar, E.: Co-developing climate services with local agents: The INDECIS Snow Tourism Index , EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-8926, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-8926, 2020.

AQUACLEW (Advancing Data Quality for European Water Services) is an ERA4CS project with the overall goal to improve quality of climate services. The project brings together nine European organisations, with different experience and expertise in developing climate services, providing data and collaborating with users. The project aims to investigate how to increase user uptake in a broad community using general information from a web interface, as well as tailored user-specific decision-support in seven case studies across Europe. Additionally, we track our ‘climate friendliness’ throughout the project.

AQUACLEW uses innovative research techniques and integrated co-development with users to advance the quality and usability of climate services for a number of water related sectors. We pose the following research questions: 1) how do we improve co-development to better incorporate multiple user feedbacks along the entire climate service production chain, from research to production, service use and decision making? 2) How should data, quality-assurance metrics and guidance be tailored along the whole data-production chain to closer meet user requirements, including resolution and precision?

Firstly, initial results show that the iterative approach between providers and users of data, demands confidence building through active engagement and involvement of experts to think on different pathways of action for users to interact with climate services and to integrate climate projections into their practice. To facilitate this interaction a number of online activities were designed:  a guided-tour for the climate service, feedback loops, and game-like activities were included in the meetings with focus groups.

Secondly we focused on investigating how data, quality-assurance metrics and guidance could be tailored along the whole data-production chain to closer meet user requirements, through three different experiments following different protocols. Protocols were developed for differentiated split sample testing in hydrological models and bias adjustment methods, and an expert elicitation. All three protocols were applied across four of seven case studies that had common factors to test the improvements of data production. The protocols had a strong impact through improved data quality in impact assessments for climate change adaptation in water management, thus decision-making can be better supported.

Lastly, we found preliminarily that ‘climate friendly’ efforts have provoked regular discussions within the consortium, suggestions for new ways to be climate friendly, challenges to travel by train and to find online solutions.

How to cite: Photiadou, C., Little, L., Berg, P., Pimentel, R., Jose Polo, M., Sonnenborg, T., Pasten-Zapata, E., Andréassian, V., Lückenkötter, J., Kruse, P., Leidinger, D., Huber, A., Achleitner, S., Lira Loarca, A., and Arheimer, B.: Best practises and lessons learnt from AQUACLEW, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-8455, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-8455, 2020.

National meteorological institutes have generally a longstanding scientific expertise in climate research, climatological observations, and state-of-the-art climate modelling. In the context of climate change this expertise and service provision of climatic data, information and knowledge is of crucial importance to meet the societal needs. Furthermore, in each country the provision of climate services is generally arranged differently and strongly determined by governance, the official strategy and tasks of the meteorological institutes, as well as financing.

To better align the activities between national climate service providers, the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and the Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium successfully applied for the ERA4CS action for the exchange of staff, aiming to contribute to the alignment of R&D programmes, tools/instruments and/or climate related agendas of both countries.

In the context of climate services, previous interactions between both institutes are mainly related to sporadically contacts between scientists in need of climatological data or information on methods for the definition of e.g. climate scenarios. However, Belgium and the Netherlands are neighbouring, both small countries, and climate change doesn’t stop at the border. Furthermore, coastal and inland regions along the borders are yet very sensitive to the impacts of climate change, and thus might cause cross-border issues in the future.

Therefore, a two-way visit of senior staff responsible for climate services in both institutes is planned for early 2020. The visits aim to identify the differences and similarities on how climate services are currently provided and the broader context in which climate services are developed and delivered (legal mandate, what other organisations deliver climate services, relation with policy e.g. National Adaptation Strategies). More specifically, the services related to both current and future climate conditions (i.e. climate scenarios), the respective impact sectors and users/stakeholders of the climate services and the interaction with them, the used tools and methods for the creation of climate services, and the outreach and communication strategies for climate services will be discussed through informal interactions, meetings and presentations.

An overview of these discussions together with conclusions on how climate-service related actions can be aligned and consolidated within future collaborations, will be presented.

How to cite: Bessembinder, J. and De Troch, R.: Options and challenges for collaboration on climate service related activities at KNMI and KMI, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-1532, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-1532, 2020.

The actual use of climate services depends on the identification of real user needs and their integration into the service. Thus, for the production of climate services user involvement is a vital component. Descriptions of practical approaches in the scientific literature are rare but necessary in order to gain better user insights and to improve the user-provider interface. In the frame of the ERA4CS project EVOKED, we apply the user-centered Living Lab approach to develop climate services with the objective to support the coastal adaptation process in Flensburg, a city vulnerable to coastal flooding due to sea-level rise. The aim is to transform climate information into valuable and useable climate services for users. In the beginning of the project we identified the climate service user needs of the community. Thereafter, we co-produced a web-based story map in collaboration with the users, as an information tool for the general public. The story map includes information on sea-level rise and its potential impacts and displays information on relevant adaptations options. For the production process of the story map we started with a compilation phase by drafting a first version of the story map from the providers’ perspective, followed by a demonstration and online feedback phase with user involvement. Based on the received feedback, we adjusted the story map to meet user needs. Results showed the need for clearer visualization of e.g. exposed locations in the city and more detailed information on adaptation measures. Preliminary findings indicate that the active provider-user interaction for the climate service may lead to long-term adaptation action.

How to cite: Vollstedt, B., Koerth, J., and Vafeidis, A.: How to co-produce climate services in collaboration with users? Insights from a story map development process. , EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-10071, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-10071, 2020.

A group of scientists in a multi-national consortium have worked together to improve climate services for maritime actors in Arctic waters. The consortium under the project Enhancing the Saliency of climate services for marine mobility Sectors in European Arctic Seas (SALIENSEAS) running 2017-2020, has aimed to coproduce improved (sub)seasonal sea ice forecast and iceberg detection services. The project involved metservice experts and end users to collaboratively explore ways in which forecast services can reduce uncertainties for stakeholders.

However, direct questioning about perceived risks and uncertainties during operations do not always lend themselves well to traditional inquiries such as self-report surveys. Stakeholders can and do experience difficulty accurately recalling and rating past perceptions and connecting them to varying environmental conditions. As an alternative, experiential approaches such as participatory simulation are able to furnish a reliable environment that facilitates replication, experimenting and learning.

We present a novel approach with which to explore effects from the reliability of sub-seasonal sea ice forecasts on the user’s perception of uncertainties. Our methods combine anticipatory methods through the use of scenarios with participatory simulation in a computerized simulation/game called ICEWISE. In our paper we will:

• introduce the game and the newly developed seasonal sea ice forecast
• present results from a gaming workshop conducted with experts in Arctic marine operations
• discuss the role of full and structured debriefing in maximizing the learning that takes place during gaming sessions

To conclude, we reflect on the upcoming stages of data collection, which will culminate in an exploratory model. The model will serve to inform sea ice service providers about the potential mediating effects deriving from the reliability of sea ice forecasts on the user’s own perceived confidence in successful voyage planning.   

How to cite: Blair, B., Muller, M., Palerme, C., Blair, R., Crookall, D., and Lamers, M.: ICEWISE: A game to test the effects of sea ice forecast reliability on voyage planners’ confidence, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-19882, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-19882, 2020.

Extreme event attribution (EEA) proposes scientific diagnostics on whether and how a specific weather event is (or is not) different in the actual world from what it could have been in a world without climate change. This branch of climate science has developed to the point where European institutions are preparing the ground for an operational attribution service. In this context, the goal of this article is to explore a panorama of scientist perspectives on their motivations to undertake EEA studies. To do so, we rely on qualitative semi-structured interviews of climate scientists involved in EEA, on peer-reviewed social and climate literature discussing the usefulness of EEA, and on reports from the EUCLEIA project (European Climate and Weather Events: Interpretation and Attribution), which investigated the possibility of building an EEA service. We propose a classification of EEA’s potential uses and users and discuss each of them. We find that, first, there is a plurality of motivations and that individual scientists disagree on which one is most useful. Second, there is a lack of solid, empirical evidence to back up any of these motivations.

How to cite: Jezequel, A., Dépoues, V., Guillemot, H., Rajaud, A., Trolliet, M., Vrac, M., Vanderlinden, J.-P., and Yiou, P.: Singular Extreme Events and Their Attribution to Climate Change: A Climate Service–Centered Analysis , EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-8553, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-8553, 2020.

There is an increasing demand for tailored climate information to feed into decision making. At the UK Met Office, we are responding to this need through work in the Climate Science for Services Partnership (CSSP) China, a scientific research programme in collaboration with the China Meteorological Administration and the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. We are applying a full cycle of prototyping to a range of new and existing climate services for priority sectors in China, such as food security and urban hotspot satellite mapping, using leading climate research to co-develop useful and useable climate services.

Recent research in food security has produced a toolkit for risk to crop production across multiple regions in China. We are now evolving the accessibility and communication of this information with decision-makers to enable delivery of this service to the appropriate end-user groups. We are also working to tailor urban hotspot satellite data to specific users, for instance the health sector, to identify and inform vulnerable populations. Through appropriate user engagement, such as workshops, surveys and interviews, we are exploring specific stakeholder requirements to pull-through science to services. This work has wider implications in having the potential to feed into important adaptation decisions and to demonstrate the effectiveness of the cycle of prototyping.

How to cite: Weeks, J., New, S., Dunbar, T., Golding, N., and Hewitt, C.: Developing Prototype Climate Services in CSSP China, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-1624, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-1624, 2020.

Climate change is already impacting on Australian water resources with step changes in rainfall regimes, changes in catchment functioning and drier, hotter conditions creating major challenges for water resource management.  Water resources in most parts of the country are influenced by high interannual variability. Thus Australia's operational water management, as well as water policy and infrastructure development decisions require high resolution information that realistically defines this variability both for the past, at seasonal scales, and into the future.

In Australia, water information accounting for climate change that is available to planners and resource managers, exists for limited geographical regions such as single catchments, urban regions or states. It is typically sourced from multiple regional downscaling efforts and using different methods to interpret this data for hydrological impacts. These regional downscaling and hydrological impact data collections are either not application-ready or tailored for specific purposes only, which poses additional barriers to their use across the water and other sectors. The needs of the water sector in managing this resource over vast river basins which cross jurisdictional boundaries, such as the Murray Darling Basin, have provided a challenge for providers of climate projection information and climate services. Consistent, agreed upon approaches across impacts at the national scale are yet to be developed. However, an accessible and consistent set of climate projections for water will help ensure that climate change risks are properly factored into decision-making in the water sector.

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology is developing a seamless national landscape water service, combining historical data on water availability with forecast products, as well as hydrological impact projections. This system uses a consistent methodology based upon the Australian Water resources Assessment (AWRA-L) hydrological model across all time scales. Once delivered, these new products will contribute towards comparable water services for the water, agricultural, energy, and other sectors, providing data across timescales. From a user's perspective the service will facilitate understanding of both past and future variability across multiple timescales of interest including the associated impacts of a changing climate. Providing a seamless service will improve operational decision making by putting short- and medium-term forecasts in the context of the past and future climate variability. Operational decision making can therefore be better integrated with longer-term strategic decision making on climate change.

For services to meet user needs they must be designed in consultation with these users. An extensive user centred design (UCD) process underpins the scope and nature of the new service. Insights will be shared from the UCD outcomes including user-defined data requirements of past and future variability. Users clearly expressed needs for guidance material and information about skill, confidence and uncertainty to accompany and contextualise climate information which is a major focus of this seamless water service. To engage users and ensure useful outputs, co-design principles are being employed as part of the confidence and uncertainty assessment process to be undertaken as part of the hydrological projections service, which will underpin development of guidance to assist users navigate multiple datasets.

How to cite: Wilson, L., Donnelly, C., Hope, P., Vogel, E., Sharples, W., Peter, J., Srikanthan, S., Bende-Michl, U., Turner, M., Matic, V., Lerat, J., Pipunic, R., Frost, A., Shokri, A., Oke, A., and Nahar, J.: Climate services for water resources – the Australian experience, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-11564, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-11564, 2020.

It is mandatory to establish a detailed implementation plan on measures for adaptation to climate change of local governments, based on the Article 48 of the Framework Act on Low Carbon, Green Growth and Article 38 of the Enforcement Decree of the same Act of South Korea. However, it is difficult for local governments to establish such detailed implementation plan due to high budget spending, lack of experts in climate change field and the shift in cyclical positions of government officials. The Korea Adaptation Center for Climate Change(KACCC) has developed a system for supporting local governments to overcome the difficulties. The system provides integrated data regarding climate change adaptation, such as general information, current status and prospect of climate change, climate change impact analysis, vulnerability and risk assessment to climate change using VESTAP (Vulnerability Assessment Tool to Build Climate Change Adaptation Plan) for each region. Based on the integrated information regarding adaptation to climate change, local governments conduct a survey targeting general public, civil servants, experts, etc. using the questionnaire on adaptive awareness provided by the system. Each local government can analyze the information and inventory of adaptation measures and diagnose the policies to establish detailed implementation plans for each sector. By establishing the system, it is expected to support government officials’s task through standardization and automation of detailed implementation plans and reduce budget and time required for data collection and analysis. It is possible to improve the quality and maintain the consistency of plans by local governments. The system also supports decision making by rapid and reasonable adaptation measures leading to establishing highly effective and managed implementation plans for local governments.

※ This work was supported by Korea Environment Industry & Technology Institute(KEITI) through Climate Change Correspondence Program, funded by Korea Ministry of Environment(MOE)(2018001310004).

How to cite: Jung, H., Kim, J., Yu, I., and Lee, S.-H.: System for supporting detailed implementation plan on measures for adaptation to climate change of local governments, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-12024, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-12024, 2020.

Australia is the World’s driest inhabited continent. It is highly exposed to the impacts of climate change: surrounded by sensitive marine ecosystems including the Great Barrier Reef, vulnerable to tropical cyclones and changing monsoonal patterns in the north, experiencing declining rainfall and runoff in the heavily populated southern and eastern parts of the country, and subject to increasingly severe bushfires. The ever-present flood, drought and bushfire cycles have historically motivated government investment in programs that aim to understand the nation’s climate and its drivers, and to inform adaptation planning and disaster risk management.

Accordingly, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) have been at the forefront of understanding Australia’s past and future climate for four decades.

The most recent national climate projections were published in 2015. These focussed on the needs of the natural resource management sector and represented a first step towards delivery of climate change services tailored to the sector’s needs. Products included decision support tools and provision of training for capacity building. A key component of the research program was stakeholder engagement from inception. The resultant Climate Change in Australia website (www.climatechangeinaustralia.gov.au) and Help Desk represented the most ambitious steps to date towards a comprehensive Australian climate change service, and were a first attempt at user-driven information delivery.

Now five years on, users' needs have evolved substantially. Key drivers of this include: (1) the Paris Agreement (2015) to limit global temperature rise to below 2.0°C (ideally below 1.5°C) above pre-industrial levels, (2) implications of the Taskforce for Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD, 2017), and (3) IPCC Special Reports. This has occurred on top of a trend towards increasingly sophisticated uses of climate projections datasets for decision-making. Existing products do not meet all user needs. There is a pronounced ‘pull’ from users of climate projections for sector-specific "decision-relevant" information for risk-management decisions. The cross-jurisdictional impacts of climate change have also resulted in a need for authoritative, standardized and quality-assured climate scenarios for the entire country, to facilitate whole of sector, cross-agency and multi-sector responses and adaptation. As Lourenco et al (2016) said, climate change services for Australia need to shift from “science-driven and user informed services to user-driven and science informed services.”

There is increased emphasis on sector-specific tools that aim to provide decision-relevant information and underpinning datasets. An ongoing challenge is the need to enable the uptake of climate information in decision-making. This necessitates a skill uplift on the user side. To date, efforts have focused on the water, finance, energy, and indigenous land management sectors. Increasingly, the focus within Australia is on working together across jurisdictional boundaries to provide nationally consistent information; with enhanced transparency drawing upon climate science resources within universities and all levels of government. Strong partnerships with the private sector are also needed in order to deliver to burgeoning demand. Success will require genuine co-design, co-production and co-evaluation of sector-specific products with a suite of support services appropriate to the needs of diverse users.

How to cite: Clarke, J., Braganza, K., Gooley, G., Grose, M., and Wilson, L.: From climate projections to climate change services in Australia – retrospective and future directions, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-20393, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-20393, 2020.

MED-GOLD is an EU-funded Horizon 2020 project (https://www.med-gold.eu/) whose main objective is to demonstrate the proof-of-concept for climate services in agriculture by developing case studies for three staples of the Mediterranean food system: grapes, olives and durum wheat.

MED-GOLD will propose climate services deploying forecast information at seasonal (next 6 months) and long-term (next 30 years). This information will be provided at higher spatial resolution than what is currently available. To provide the highest value for decision-making, the services will be co-developed with professional users from each sector.

For the wine sector, the project objective is to use the most recent state-of-the-art climate models outputs to produce user-oriented predictions of essential climate variables, bioclimatic indicators  and ad-hoc implemented compound risk indices. All of these indices  are relevant for viticulture at large scales, and more specifically for the MED-GOLD focus region of the Douro valley (Portugal). The indices  will be readily available for users in the grape and wine sector under several different formats and visualizations, allowing for easy, quick and seamless integration into critical decision-making.

Timely warnings of when climate change might impose a disruptive pressure upon wine production systems offers stakeholders a chance to act proactively both at seasonal (operational campaign planning) and decadal (strategic business planning) time-scales, making the wine sector more resilient to the impacts of climate change.

How to cite: Dell'Aquila, A. and the the MED-GOLD Wine Service Team: Turn climate information into value for the Mediterranean wine sector: the MED-GOLD potential, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-7046, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-7046, 2020.

Early within-season weather conditions forecast and yield prediction can provide useful information to improve farmers' management decisions and to create a unique opportunity for implementing new solutions to specifically address key aspects of agricultural systems.

Within the aims of the EU funded Horizon 2020 MED-GOLD project (https://www.med-gold.eu/), a durum wheat case study has been established to assess an innovative climate service tools for the management of climate risks and to increase yield and reduce potential risk.

In this study, the added value of seasonal forecast was assessed by looking at the historical yield data and by comparing the data provided by climate service tool with traditional crop forecasting systems.

For three hot spot areas (Ravenna, Ancona, and Foggia), the skills of the ECMWF-System5 seasonal time-scale forecasting provided through the Copernicus Data Store (CDS) were evaluated as a driver to the crop modeling system DELPHI, to test their added value to durum wheat yield prediction.

Initially, the DELPHI model was run with observed daily weather data from sowing to harvest to obtain the reference yield. Then, yield predictions were calculated at a monthly time step, starting from February 1st and April 1st, by feeding the model with synthetic weather scenarios based on historical observations (dry, average, wet scenario - current mode) and with weather seasonal forecast (new tool) until the end of the growing season. Results for yield prediction on the basis of the current DELPHI System (historical scenarios) and on the basis of seasonal forecast (25 ensembles) were compared against reference yield.

For Foggia and Ancona, in low yielding crop years and 4 months before harvest, the mean yield prediction based on the new DELPHI System tool show lower normalized root mean square error values (nRMSE) than yield predictions based on the current DELPHI system, while the latter performs better 2 months before harvest. The opposite conditions arise for the Ravenna area: lower nRMSE for the current DELPHI system 4 months before harvest and lower nRMSE for the new DELPHI system 2 months before harvest.  In high yielding crop years, the new DELPHI system performs better than the current one in all the study areas both 4 and 2 months before harvest, except in Foggia where the current DELPHI system shows lower nRMSE 2 months before harvest. In general, the availability of unbiased data slightly improved the yield forecast, with the best result achieved for the high yielding crop year in Ancona, where 2 months before harvest the nRMSE dropped from 20.3% (biased) to 9.3% (unbiased). Based on these first promising results this benchmarking framework will be extended over a wider study area and for the full reanalysis temporal coverage.

How to cite: Dainelli, R., Calmanti, S., Pasqui, M., Di Giuseppe, E., Monotti, C., Ronchi, C., Silvestri, M., Chou, C., Gonzalez, N., Marcos, R., and Toscano, P.: Yield prediction of durum wheat: the added value of MED-GOLD climate services products, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-20694, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-20694, 2020.

This presentation aims to discuss some issues regarding the role of the economic evaluation of climate services in the context of the Horizon 2020 CLARA project.

CLARA provides 14 innovative services based on a co-development approach involving service producers and specific final users. In this context, the first issue is the role of the evaluation in the co-development framework. Our understanding suggests that it cannot be one of the last steps in the process, but a preliminary evaluation should be presented in the co-design of the service. For this reason, we advise the use of the “maximum likely value” as a signal for both developers and users. It derives from a comparison between the values of two alternative knowledge sources (i.e. one other than the climate service and the other as a 100% skill climate service). The “maximum likely value” provides a benchmark against which to compare the final product. It gives insights to the producer how to improve the service, while the final user has a direct and understandable measure of likely benefits from climate service adoption. This directly supports a higher engagement of the final user, whose participation is essential in developing the service as well as in gathering information for the evaluation.

Moreover, the final user’s participation has a strong impact in assessing how the services enter the decision- making process that is sometimes an obscure issue in the internal dynamic of the organizations. Recognizing a benefit stimulate the discussion on how the tool may be used internally. This sometimes leads to changes in the service design to meet better the users’ requirements. Another critical issue is the final user’s ability to translate into actions the signals of the climate services as well as to predict and quantify costs and benefits of actions based on climate services forecasts.

All these issues are discussed presenting examples from the CLARA project, especially from a set of services related to renewable energy production and water management.

How to cite: Delpiazzo, E. and Bosello, F.: Valuing climate services: experiences from the CLARA project, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-21609, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-21609, 2020.

Accurate and reliable information from climate predictions at seasonal time-scales can have an essential role to anticipate climate variability affecting supply of renewables energy and to stabilize and secure the energy network as a whole. A number of recognized modes of variability -often called teleconnections- explain a large part of Earth’s climate variations and represent an important source of climate predictability. The leading atmospheric variability modes in the Euro-Atlantic sector (EATC) affect surface variables such as 2 meters temperature, solar radiation downward, and surface wind anomalies in Europe.

Characterizing EATC in observations and assessing their simulation and prediction and their impact on the energy sector can help to better understand patterns of seasonal-scale inter annual variability in renewables resources and to consider to what extent this variability might be predictable up to several months in advance. Furthermore EATC can be used to formulate empirical prediction of local climate variability (relevant for the energy sector) based on the large scale atmospheric variability modes predicted by the forecast systems.

To achieve this goal we analyze reanalysis dataset ERA5 and the multi-system seasonal forecast service provided by the Copernicus Climate Data Store (C3S).

Geopotential height anomalies at 500 hPa have been employed to compute the four Euro-Atlantic teleconnections North Atlantic Oscillation, East Atlantic, Scandinavian and East Atlantic-West Russian. The impacts of those four variability modes on the energy - relevant  essential climate variables have been assessed in both observed and predicted system. We have found that the observed relationship between EATC patterns and surface impacts is not accurately reproduced by seasonal prediction systems. This opens the door to employ hybrid dynamical-statistical methods. The idea consists in combining the dynamical seasonal predictions of EATC indices with the observed relationship between EATCs and surface variables.  We reconstructed the surface anomalies for multiple seasonal prediction systems and benchmarked these hybrid forecasts with the direct variable forecasts from the systems and also with the climatology. The analysis suggest that predictions of energy relevant Essential Climate Variables are improved by the hybrid methodology in almost all Europe. 

How to cite: Cionni, I., Lledó, L., Catalano, F., and Dell’Aquila, A.: Seasonal predictions of energy-relevant Essential Climate Variables through Euro-Atlantic Teleconnections, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-21184, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-21184, 2020.

The practice of surf is extended around the Iberian Peninsula’s coast. Surf-spots are the specific nearshore locations where surfing occurs. This coastal sport needs specific environmental conditions to be done. Knowing which is the distribution of surfing days around the Iberian Peninsula is a complex task. This is because good surfing conditions are the result of different climatological, geomorphological and oceanographical variables. Moreover, data collected used to define the distribution of surfing days is registered far away from the shore. Thus, the conditions registered – in the location of the buoys- will change somehow once arrive to the shore where surfers try to perform their best.

Research has explored the advancements of climate services in multiple fields but the determination of frequency of surfing days around the Iberian Peninsula by attributing data from oceanographic buoys to surf-spots was not done before. Atmospheric variability modulates in different temporal scales occurrence and severity of the waves. In this way knowing how the climate works, how the atmosphere exchanges energy with the ocean or how is transferred and how this affects to low pressures and high pressures is fundamental for understanding the conditions for surfing.

In this sense, Climate Services can provide the knowledge of the expected surfing days on surf-spots in the Iberian Peninsula by the methodology created in this study. The aim of this method is to identify the main variables which will make a good day for surfing or not. Into this context is important to know that surfing days are the result of two main factors: the influence of travelling low pressures from the ocean/sea to the specific shore (1) and the local conditions of each specific surf-spot -- thermal winds and beach orientation-- (2). The way of attributing these two factors is using buoys data to know the influence of travelling low pressures from the ocean to the shore by knowing significant wave height in open sea-. Then the form in which are attributed the local conditions is by knowing the specific favourable swell direction needed in each surf-spot and matching the direction of the swell that is registered by the buoys.  In this way, it is made an attribution from the buoy data in the open sea to the surf-spots conditions located on the shore. The main results show the distribution of the expected days for surfing in the Iberian Peninsula based on historical data.

Acknowledgments:

Puertos del Estado from Ministry of Development in Spain and Instituto Hidrográfico marinha Portugal provided the data for doing this study.

How to cite: Boqué Ciurana, A. and Aguilar, E.: How Climate Services can provide the knowledge of the expected surfing days on surf-spots in the Iberian Peninsula, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-9440, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-9440, 2020.

The Yellow River Basin is the place where Chinese civilization originated, known as the mother river of the Chinese nation. The Yellow River originates from the Bayan Kara Mountain in the Qinghai Tibet Plateau. It flows through Qinghai, Sichuan, Gansu, Ningxia, Inner Mongolia, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Henan and Shandong provinces, with a total length of 5464 kilometers, a drainage area of 795000 square kilometers and a population of 110 million. It has an important position in China's economic development. Now the development plan of the Yellow River Basin has been promoted to the level of national strategy. In order to better serve the economic development planning of the Yellow River Basin, the climate characteristics and climate risks of the upper, middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River Basin were analyzed. The topography of the Yellow River Basin is high in the West and low in the East, with great difference in topography and complex climate. It is sensitive to climate change and prone to drought and flood, extreme drought and rainstorm and flood. With global warming, the upstream tends to warm and humid, which has an important impact on the ecosystem, the middle and lower reaches tend to warm and dry, which has an important impact on pollution control and flood control. The impact of climate change must be considered in the development plan of the Yellow River Basin.

How to cite: Xiao, C. and Song, L.: Climate services for the development plan of the Yellow River Basin in China, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-6231, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-6231, 2020.

According to the National Public Health Organization in Greece, cases of West Nile Virus (WNV) infection in humans and animals have been recorded in various areas over Greece during the years 2010-2014 and 2017-2019 (https://eody.gov.gr). In this work we present a climate service which supports an Early Warning System (EWS) for the mosquito-borne WNV disease, operated for the first time over the Region of Central Macedonia in Greece. The EWS is based on a platform fed by time-dependent data (climate information and mosquito population data (Culex sp.)) and time invariant data (topography, density of mosquito breeding sites taken from field campaigns and distance to water-related land cover categories). The climate data are produced on a daily basis by the WRF-AUTH-MC weather forecast model over a 2x2 Km grid covering the Region of Central Macedonia, which operates from April to October (mosquito circulation period). Mosquito samples are collected every 2 weeks by the company ECODEVELOPMENT, using CO₂ mosquito traps. The mosquito data along with the climatic and static environmental information are utilized within a Generalized Linear Model (GLM). Based on an empirical relationship derived from the GLM, the overall environmental suitability for the Culex mosquito is assessed over the study region. The work is performed in the framework of the German-Greek bilateral project “Establishment of an Early Warning System for mosquito borne diseases” (http://www.wnvalert.eu/), which is focusing on improved measures on proactive mosquito control and disease prevention activities.

How to cite: Katragkou, E., Karypidou, M. C., Kartsios, S., Gewehr, S., and Mourelatos, S.: Building a climate service to support an Εarly Warning System for the West Nile Virus disease in Greece, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-18979, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-18979, 2020.

There are now a plethora of data, models and approaches available to produce climate information intended to inform adaptation to a changing climate. There is, however, no analytical framework to assess the epistemic issues concerning the quality of these data, models and approaches. An evaluation of the quality of climate information is a fundamental requirement for its appropriate application in societal decision-making. By integrating insights from the philosophy of science, environmental social science and physical climate science, we construct an analytical framework for “science-based statements about future climate” that allows for an assessment of their quality for adaptation planning. We target statements about local and regional climate with a lead time of one to one hundred years. Our framework clarifies how standard quality descriptors in the literature, such as “robustness”, “adequacy”, “completeness” and “transparency”, rely on both the type of evidence and the relationship between the evidence and the statement. This clarification not only provides a more precise framework for quality, but also allows us to show how certain evidential standards may change as a function of the purpose of a statement. We argue that the most essential metrics to assess quality are: Robustness, Theory, Completeness, Adequacy for purpose, Transparency. Our framework goes further by providing guidelines on when quantitative statements about future climate are warranted and potentially decision-relevant, when these statements would be more valuable taking other forms (e.g. qualitative statements), and when statements about future climate are not warranted at all.

How to cite: Baldissera Pacchetti, M., Dessai, S., Bradley, S., and Stainforth, D. A.: Assessing the quality of climate information for adaptation., EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-20133, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-20133, 2020.

How to cite: Woolliams, E., Fisicaro, P., Fox, N., Pascale, C., Seitz, S., Monte, C., Werhahn, O., Gorman, D., Dobre, M., and Damitz, T.: Metrology for Climate Sciences: The European Metrology Network for Climate and Ocean Observation , EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-21628, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-21628, 2020.

The German national metrology institute Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) is organized in typical different sections and divisions, each of them bringing in their own portfolio on specific calibration and measurement capabilities. Customer are being served on various fields of work and metrological SI-traceability strategies are developed for all the units of measurements. However, despite many third-party projects driven by individual PTB groups [1], as for example within the European Metrology Programme for Innovation and Research (EMPIR, [2]) and its different Environmental calls, PTB has never been seen itself as a climate research institute. With the foundation of the European Metrology Network for Climate and Ocean Observation (EMN) [3], PTB has now brought its various expertise on metrology for climate research to a new level of combination.

The presentation highlights the input from three different working groups of PTB to the EMN related to its sections “Atmosphere”, “Ocean”, and “Land” as being addressed by the groups for Spectrometric Gas Analysis [4], Electrochemistry [5], and Infrared Radiation Thermometry [6], respectively. With those expertise PTB seeks to support the idea of the EMN bringing in measurement techniques like in situ laser spectroscopy-based species quantification, FTIR-based analysis of atmospheric gases and related spectral line parameters of key greenhouse gases and offering its consulting services to the EMN in the “Atmosphere” section. On the “Ocean” section of the EMN PTB offers its expertise based on ph-measurements, salinity definitions and respective calibration and measurement capabilities, whereas the “Land” section of the EMN is benefitting from PTB’s application-specific traceability concepts for infrared radiation thermometry and infrared radiometry and for quantitative thermography and for emissivity measurements in the field of satellite-, aircraft- and ground-based optical remote sensing of the atmosphere and Earth (-90 °C to 100 °C).

Examples for all three working groups will be presented and discussed in view of there benefit to the EMN. Collaboration with European partners will be shown.

Acknowledgements:

Parts of the work has received funding from the EMPIR programme co-financed by the Participating States and from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. PTB acknowledges the collaboration with all partners in the EMN for Climate and Ocean Observation.

References:

[1] EMPIR 16ENV05 MetNO2 (http://empir.npl.co.uk/metno2/), EMPIR 16ENV06 SIRS (https://www.vtt.fi/sites/SIRS/), EMPIR 16ENV08 (http://empir.npl.co.uk/impress/)

[2] European Metrology Programme for Innovation and Research, https://www.euramet.org/research-innovation/research-empir/?L=0

[3] European Metrology Network for Climate and Ocean Observation, https://www.euramet.org/european-metrology-networks/climate-and-ocean-observation/?L=0

[4] PTB working group Spectrometric Gas Analysis, https://www.ptb.de/cms/en/ptb/fachabteilungen/abt3/fb-34/ag-342.html

[5] PTB working group Electrochemistry, https://www.ptb.de/cms/en/ptb/fachabteilungen/abt3/fb-31/ag-313.html

[6] PTB working group Infrared Radiation Thermometry https://www.ptb.de/cms/en/ptb/fachabteilungen/abt7/fb-73/ag-732.html

How to cite: Werhahn, O., Monte, C., and Seitz, S.: PTB for Climate Sciences: Combined efforts supporting the European Metrology Network for Climate and Ocean Observation, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-21384, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-21384, 2020.

Despite the existing ample amount of scientific knowledge on the impacts of climate change, this information is often not conveyed in a way that is relevant and useful to decision makers. If designed correctly, climate services can bridge the gap between the knowledge providers and users. The ISIpedia project aims at developing an online encyclopedia  that provides policy-relevant, user-driven climate impact information based on the data and scientific knowledge generated by the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Inter-comparison Project (ISIMIP,) community. In order to ensure that the information provided is accessible and understandable, ISIpedia has facilitated a dialogue between modellers and stakeholders through a number of stakeholder engagement activities.

The ISIpedia portal will deliver national- and global- level assessments of impacts of climate change across different sectors to the identified end-users that range from climate adaptation planners (e.g. involved in National Adaptation Plans) and practitioners, regional knowledge hubs, trans- and interdisciplinary scientists to regional climate experts from the private and public sectors. The portal is also characterised by an intuitive and user-friendly interface for better dissemination and application of this knowledge.

Through an interactive exploration of the ISIpedia portal, during this session we will not only introduce the beta version of ISIpedia but also discuss in detail how our stakeholder engagement processes have shaped the portal’s current functionalities and its design. More specifically, the audience will get a chance to create country-specific climate impact assessments and test the legibility of the content, which includes interactive graphs and maps as well as method descriptions. We will also explore how different inter-sectoral indicators, some of which were derived from our workshops in Eastern Europe (Poland, November 2018) and West Africa (Burkina Faso, February 2019), can be applied to managing climate risks, vulnerabilities and planning adaptation and/or larger political contexts, such as the Sustainable Development Goals or Disaster Risk Reduction and what new indicators can be developed. Additionally, we will present other functional and design features, such as the glossary, data download functions and news, that we identified as added values to the portal during diverse stakeholder engagement activities.

The inputs gathered from the EGU conference, along with the ones from the planned feedback workshops in Southeast Asia (April 2020), Eastern Europe (June 2020) and West Africa (October 2020), will be taken into account for further improvement of the portal until its final release in the fall of 2020. Furthermore, a reflection on the successes and challenges of our co-development process will be shared.

How to cite: Yesil, B., Lejeune, Q., Menke, I., Lee, K., Templ, B., Perrette, M., Mengel, M., Lange, S., Gieseke, R., and Frieler, K.: Introducing the beta version of ISIpedia, the open climate-impacts encyclopaedia, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-21584, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-21584, 2020.

We will present a new service designed to assist the users of model data in running their analyses in world-class supercomputers. The increase of data volumes and model complexities can be challenging for data users with limited access to high performance computers or low network bandwidth. To avoid heavy data transfers, strong memory requirements, and slow sequential processing, the data science community is rapidly moving from classical client-side to new server-side frameworks. Three simple steps enable server-side users to compute in parallel and near the data: (1) discover the data you are interested in, (2) perform your analyses and visualizations in the supercomputer, and (3) download the outcome. A server-side service is especially beneficial for exploiting the high-volume data collections produced in the framework of internationally coordinated model intercomparison projects like CMIP5/6 and CORDEX and disseminated via the  Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) infrastructure. To facilitate the adoption of server-side capabilities by the ESGF users, the infrastructure project of the European Network for Earth System Modelling (IS-ENES3) is now opening its high performance resources and data pools at the CMCC (Italy), JASMIN (UK), IPSL (France), and DKRZ (Germany) supercomputing centers. The data pools allow access to results from several models on the same site and the data and resources are locally maintained by the hosts. Besides, our server-side framework not only speeds the workload but also reduces the errors in file format conversions and standardizations and software dependencies and upgrade. The service is founded by the EU Commission and it is free of charge. Find more information here: https://portal.enes.org/data/data-metadata-service/analysis-platforms. Demos and tutorials have been created by a dedicated user support team. We will present several use cases showing how easy and flexible it is to use our analysis platforms for multimodel comparisons of CMIP5/6 and CORDEX data. 

How to cite: Kindermann, S. and Moreno, M.: Broadening access to supercomputers for CMIP6 and CORDEX multimodel comparisons, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-19121, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-19121, 2020.

We present the interactive web application GCMeval, available at https://gcmeval.met.no. The tool is a useful resource for climate services by illustrating how model selection affects representation of future climate change. GCMeval was developed in a co-design process engaging users. Based on a thorough analysis of user demands, needs and capabilities, two different user groups were defined: Data users with lots of experience with data processing and Product users with a strong focus on information products. The available data, information, and user interface in GCMeval are tailored to the requirements of the data users.

In the tool, the user can select all or a subset of models from the CMIP5 and CMIP6 ensembles and assign weights to different regions, seasons, climate variables, and skill scores. The tool provides visualizations of the spread of future changes in temperature and precipitation which allows the user to study how the sub-ensemble fits in relation to the full multi-model ensemble and to compare climate model results for different regions of the world. A ranking of individual model performance for recent past climate is also provided. The tool can be used to aid in model selection for climate or impact studies, or to illustrate how an already existing selection represents the range of possible future climate outcomes.

How to cite: Parding, K., Landgren, O. A., Dobler, A., McSweeney, C. F., Benestad, R. E., Erlandsen, H. B., Mezghani, A., Gregow, H., Räty, O., Viktor, E., El Zohbi, J., Bøssing Christensen, O., and Loukos, H.: Global climate model evaluation and selection using the interactive tool GCMeval, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-19623, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-19623, 2020.

In recognition of the need for data used in climate-related activities to be reliably and transparently managed, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO[1]) Congress adopted a High-Quality Global Data Management Framework for Climate (HQ-GDMFC) at its eighteenth session in June 2019. The HQ-GDMFC enables effective standards-based development and exchange of high-quality climate data.  The scope of the HQ-GDMFC includes all of the Essential Climate Variables under WMO auspices, as described in WMO Resolution 60 (Cg-17).  This includes observational data as well as data derived from climate analysis, reanalysis, predictions and projections.  The framework of collaboration incorporates the National Meteorological and Hydrological Services’ Data Management units, Regional Climate Centers, international data centers, climate research bodies, certain Government agencies, academia and any other institution dealing with climate data archival, management, analysis and exchange. An International Expert Group on Climate Data Modernization (IEG-CDM²) was established in 2018³, involving subject matter experts from several WMO programs and international data centers to guide the development of practical tools required for assessing data maturity for climate purposes.

We present here the structure, elements and associated guidance and tools of the HQ-GDFMC. The essential components are: (1) The standards and recommended best practices for climate data management and stewardship are encapsulated in a regulatory manual called the Manual on HQ-GDMFC (WMO-No 1238). (2) A guidance booklet provides guidance on maturity assessment of climate datasets that contribute to the computation and analysis of climate indicators supporting climate policy-relevant information. (3) A climate data catalogue in support of climate change monitoring has been established, with the aim of providing a living list of datasets, with a primary focus on climate indicators. It is recommended that the maturity of such datasets be assessed; a maturity rating provides users with information on the level of maturity in documentation, archival, access, data quality assurance, data integrity and more, for each of the datasets.

How to cite: Wright, W., Lief, C., Peng, G., Baddour, O., Siegmund, P., Berod, D., Dunn, R., Cazenave, A., and Brunet, M.: High-Quality Global Data Management Framework for Climate: A Collaboration Framework for Assessing, Validating and Sharing Datasets for Climate Monitoring , EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-22552, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-22552, 2020.