User involvement to prepare a Pan-European climate visualisation platform targeted at decision makers and educational purposes

This contribution relates to preparatory efforts for creating a transnational, multilinguistic visualisation tool of past, present, forecasted and future (weather and) climate information in Europe, targeted to a large range of users. There is no scarcity of observed or modelled climate data, especially in Europe. However, existing climate information are often hidden, poorly explained or not accessible (in their complexity and structure) for non-scientists in many countries, especially in Eastern Europe and Russia. Needed are hence clear, reliable, and concise facts to easily understand the complex topic of climate change, supported by a high spatial resolution of climate information for local concernment.

We identified two superordinated target groups: 1) decision makers, demanding easily accessible and digestible, as well as for decision making processes usable climate information and 2) educational institutions and the general public, who will profit from more intuitive ways teaching and informing about climate change. We here present results of a user survey carried out in five countries (in native language) and of key stakeholder interviews within the same countries.

In the surveys, we approached potential users within different countries to explore what climate data they need, in which complexity, spatio-temporal detail, actuality and visualisation style. We also aimed to explore if similar actors of different countries may have similar or different needs, and how we may prepare an optimal product useful for a large range of users located in different countries. Follow-up key stakeholder interviews helped us deepening the level of understanding of user needs. Such interviews allowed us to go into more details than the questionnaire. It also enabled us to present the users content of existing webpages presenting climate information, to identify what the users like, dislike or miss in existing tools - e.g., in terms of data visualisation, handling, comparison and comprehensiveness. Coordinating country partners served as multipliers to reach users in their national language and to evaluate the results. Those activities disseminated the ideas of our planned platform in those countries and between different users there.