TRANSLATE: Met Éireann’s approach to standardised national climate change scenarios

TRANSLATE is a Met Éireann led initiative to standardise future climate scenarios for Ireland. It is a multidisciplinary programme, extending beyond climate science and services to include disciplines such as engineering, social science, visual and creative arts and communications. TRANSLATE’s primary aim is to mainstream national climate information to support the development of effective decision relevant climate services. TRANSLATE aims to achieve the following: 

• Develop robust, standardised national climate scenaios from annual to climate timescales. 

• Develop scalable and reproducible climate services. 

• Enhance the uptake of climate information. 

• Enhance the communication across all audiences. 

• Support the National Framework for Climate Services in strengthening the national climate services community . 

Data from TRANSLATE underpins many national and local climate directives. It feeds directly into the National Framework for Climate Services to support climate services development, coordination and standardisation and Climate Ireland, the national portal for climate adaptation. It is embedded within the National Adaptation Framework and the National Climate Change Risk Assessment supporting local climate action and sectoral adaptation plans. It is critical that information and services from the programme remain relevant and robust to ensure policy and decisions are based on the most accurate and up to date climate information, as well as ensuring that decision makers have access to the highest quality climate data when required and consistency across planning cycles. 

TRANSLATE is beginning its 3rd iteration. This phase marks a significant expansion to the programme in scope and funding. There are four pillars, 

• Underpinning data 

• Understanding climate extremes  

• Climate Services 

• Communication 

The provision of national climate information can be challenging and each pillar while expanding on existing work also seeks to address the identified gaps and challenges from previous phases. These include technical and scientific hurdles, information gaps and challenges in communication of information and uncertainty in a way that is both relevant and accessible. 

Here we look across the programme from phase 1- 3 exploring the lessons learned, what challenges were encountered and how the programme is working to overcome them.  We will explore the latest plans and opportunities within each pillar drawing from emerging science and understanding within climate science. We will highlight plans to combine different strands of climate information, the use of storyline approaches as well as challenges around data, extremes, uncertainty and seamless information. Finally, we will look to the future – CMIP7, developments in AI and steer from Europe and what the implications of these may be for the next phase of TRANSLATE.