Making complex climate information available for a stakeholder dialogue: the Climate Monitor for Northern Germany

Climate research in Northern Germany provides important information to enable adaption to climate change. However, the increasing complexity and the amount of data that needs to be processed makes the information inaccessible for external parties outside of the climate modeling community. Since 2007 the Coastal and Climate Office for Northern Germany at Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon has maintained a long term stakeholder dialogue. In this context, we make knowledge on coastal climate research available to the public, and to decision-makers. Our range of stakeholders consists of adjacent scientific research groups, interested individuals, governmental bodies, non-governmental organizations, media, education and more.

Web applications, such as the Climate Monitor for Northern Germany, play a central role in our efforts to transfer scientific knowledge to our stakeholders. Originally released in 2014, the monitor comprehends data derived from freely available climate datasets of the last few decades, such as CoastDat, eOBS, CRU TS and more. We provide derived climate information for the most-requested parameters, namely temperature, precipitation, humidity, wind, cloudiness, and vegetation but also analyze indices on extremes such as heat, severe rain fall and storms. We answer the questions of our regional stakeholders, e.g. “How does a changing climate affect our interests?”, by visualizing spatial averages (municipality to state-level scale), as well as comprehensive, interactive and comparable time-series and a descriptive interpretation of both. This tool has been proven to be a valuable asset in stakeholder communication and allows everyone to access crucial climate information for their region of interest.

In our latest release we take user needs into account and redesign the front-end using a mixture of open-source libraries and OGC services provided by ESRI. With the re-design we introduce interactive webmaps and apps, intended to simplify navigability through this complex theme and its far-reaching visualization collection. We aim to increase user engagement through a familiar user interface, consistent with similar web applications. Our data processing pipelines have been streamlined to make the results conform to the FAIR principles. Besides the visual representation of the results, we provide download options for the raw data, and the computational methods are published open-source in the form of Jupyter notebooks. We focus on ease of maintenance, accessibility and on instantaneous publication of the latest results. In this presentation we highlight the workflows and experiences behind creating this user centric web tool, and discuss where we see the benefits of integrating web tools in knowledge transfer.