Climadjust: easing the Bias Adjustment process through a user-friendly web service

Climate projections obtained from global and regional climate models usually exhibit biases: systematic deviations from observations. Adjusting these biases is typically the first step towards obtaining actionable climate information to be used in impact studies. However, this bias adjustment process is highly technical and demands a lot of resources, both infrastructures (e.g. access to high performance and cloud computing) —particularly for continental wide applications— and human (e.g. personnel specialised in climate data post-processing).

Climadjust (accessible through https://climadjust.com/) is a web service developed with the support of the Copernicus Climate Change Service  implementing user-friendly bias adjustment for climate projections from the C3S catalogue using customized methods and reference datasets. The service was developed by Predictia —a company with a strong focus on climate services development and climate modelling— in collaboration with the Spanish Research Council (CSIC). 

Climadjust provides scalable cloud resources to compute bias-adjusted climate projections from the ensembles of CMIP and CORDEX datasets or customized areas of interest. In this process, the users are able to (i) upload their own dataset of observations to adjust the climate projections, or choose among reference datasets such as ERA5-Land or WFDE-5, (ii) choose among six state-of-the-art Bias Adjustment techniques implemented using the open source Climate4R package, and (iii) validate the results through the standard framework developed in the European VALUE COST Action. The output is a validated netCDF file, ready to be used by the climate modellers working in climate studies.

This climate service is targeted at the end tail of the downstream market of climate services, namely climate modellers working in sectoral climate adaptation in the agriculture, hydrology, biodiversity, insurance and forestry management fields, among others. Currently, the service counts with over 100 registered users.

To promote the user uptake of the service, the project faced several barriers, such as a lack of understanding on the need of adjusting biases by the end-users, and communication barriers between the climate science community and the end-user community. The session will present the lessons learnt during the user uptake campaigns, the user needs gathered through the user engagement activities performed within it, as well as relevant use-cases of the service, developed hand in hand with the end users.