TRANSLATE: Providing Standardised National Climate Services for Ireland

The TRANSLATE project is a Met Éireann lead initiative, steered by national and international experts, to standardise future climate projections for Ireland and develop equitable and accessible climate services that meet the climate information needs of decision makers across Ireland.

Working alongside national experts, from the Irish Centre for High End Computing (ICHEC), NUI Galway, and the SFI Research Centre for Energy, Climate and Marine (MaREI), UCC, TRANSLATE aims to:

• Produce robust standardised national climate projections for Ireland (June 2023).
• Co-develop prototype climate services, implementing TRANSLATE’s standardised projections and demonstrating how this climate information can meet the needs of the Irish adaptation sector.
• Provide information and documentation that informs the standardisation of cross-sectoral decision making for climate sensitive sectors.
• Ensure that standardised projections, summary information and climate services are easily accessible and useful to all potential users.

• Facilitate the development of climate services using standardised climate information within the National Framework for Climate Services (NFCS).

TRANSLATE critically scrutinises existing climate scenarios, effectively choosing the most suitable for Ireland. It follows international best practice for combining multiple climate simulations and applies downscaling and statistical techniques to provide a robust range of high resolution (1.5 km), future climate projections for all of Ireland. Using such approaches TRANSLATE aims to improve the accuracy and resolution of existing high-resolution projections. Outputs consist of 30-year time slices of daily projections of temperature and rainfall over a range of different scenarios (RCP2.6, RCP4.5, RCP6.0 and RCP 8.5). From these, sector specific climate indices can be computed to support climate-based decision making across Ireland.

Here we will present each element of the program culminating in how these standardised projections can be used to inform decision making across sectors. We will present the projections in the form of national summaries for Ireland across global warming levels (GWL), presenting the most up to date picture of Irelands changing climate, creating national and sub-national narratives. This will include a first look at output from a provisional ensemble of CMIP6 data chosen for Ireland and presented across a range of global warming levels.