Switzerland founded its National Centre for Climate Services (NCCS) in late 2015. It is organized as a network of nine Federal Offices and Institutes as well as partners from academia. Since its launch several priority themes have been tackled and published such as new climate change scenarios in 2018 (CH2018) and new hydrological scenarios (Hydro-CH2018). These findings form an indispensable, yet incomplete basis for decision-makers in administration, economy and society. In particular, more information on future climatic impacts is needed. Here, the new programme “NCCS-Impacts” steps in by elaborating a cross-sectoral compilation of climatic impacts in Switzerland as well as a bundle of climate services for decision-support.

The aim of the NCCS programme is to obtain an overview of selected impacts under future climate change in Switzerland and its ensuing central challenges for the environment, economy and society. In addition to the generation of new science-based insights, the programme also has a clear focus on the development and provision of actionable products intended for decision-makers. To this end, the work in the different projects will follow a co-production approach.

In its core, the programme consists of six cross-sectoral and interlinked climate impacts projects that cover the aspects of (1) socio-economic scenarios, (2) human and animal health, (3) ecosystem services, (4) indirect effects, (5) economic costs and (6) critical infrastructures. These topics were identified as priority needs in a comprehensive stakeholder dialogue with representatives from research, administration and the private sector, and by means of a desk review across various sectors.

The programme NCCS-Impacts has been launched in early 2023 and lasts until the end of 2025. In the presentation, we will give an overview of the scope of the programme and present its conceptual framework.

How to cite: Fischer, A., Hama, M., Möller, A., and Croci-Maspoli, M.: "NCCS-Impacts” – a new programme of the Swiss National Centre for Climate Services (NCCS), EMS Annual Meeting 2023, Bratislava, Slovakia, 4–8 Sep 2023, EMS2023-113, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2023-113, 2023.

Climate services provide tailored information to support climate adaptation at the local level. However, the highly specific local needs of each setting also means that they are difficult to generalise and transport from one setting to another. In this presentation we describe a collaboration between Denmark and Ghana to establish climate services in Ghana. The template for this Ghanaian climate service is Klimaatlas, the Danish National Climate Atlas, a well-established tool used by actors throughout Denmark as one of the primary tools underpinning local climate adaptation planning. Klimaatlas presents projections from the EURO-CORDEX regional climate model ensemble, bias-corrected against local observations, in the form of an interactive web-interface and tailored reports. Our initial efforts show that some parts of the Klimaatlas approach to developing a climate service can be reused directly in Ghana, particularly around user engagement and some aspects of the presentation of information: other parts however need to be rethought from scratch.  In particular, the large data volumes associated with CORDEX ensembles present a major bottleneck for applications in Ghana, where both bandwidth and storage are limited. Ensuring the robustness and durability of the service will also be critical to its success and have received particular attention. Furthermore, while there is a wealth of observational data, much of it cannot be used for bias correction in its current form. We will describe our efforts to solve these problems and the lessons learned, and present recommendations for how the climate service community can aid the development of climate services in developing countries.

How to cite: Payne, M. R., Ahiataku, M. A., Ansah, S. O., Asuman, E., Lamptey, B., Johansen, C. R., and Sarup, K.: An experiment in Climate Service portability: implementing a Danish Climate Atlas in Ghana, EMS Annual Meeting 2023, Bratislava, Slovakia, 4–8 Sep 2023, EMS2023-188, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2023-188, 2023.

Project Background: The project ‘Assessing Best Practices of Impact Based Alerting’ takes a case study approach to assessing the progress that is being made towards implementation of an impact-based paradigm for hydrometeorological warnings in both Europe and Asia. National Meteorological and Hydrological Service (NMHS) agencies around the world have been strongly encouraged by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) to transition their alerting programs from hazard-based to impact-based warnings (IBW). This is happening in the context of the Sendai Framework 2015-2030. Currently, at roughly the halfway point to the conclusion of the Sendai Framework, this project performs a ‘check-in’ on the progress of this transition at NMHSs and affiliated partners in both Europe and Asia. This investigation also comes in the wake of recent, high-profile flooding and extreme heat events in both Europe and Asia. The increasing frequency of extreme weather events due to climate change increases the need for a clear understanding of the requirements and obstacles for NMHS agencies as they transition to an IBW approach.

EMS presentation: At EMS 2023, we will present the findings of interviews conducted at NMHSs and associated key stakeholders, investigating the transition process to IBW in the UK, Sweden and Belgium in Europe and also Bhutan and Nepal in Asia. These findings contribute to a final project report (currently being developed as of April 2023). This report will be operationally relevant, speaking directly to NMHS agencies, key stakeholders (utilities, transport operators, health care practitioners, emergency management officers, etc.) and engaged members of the public alike. The focus will be on lessons learned and best practices from agencies who have already made the transition, while identifying concerns or roadblocks that may be holding back organisations who have yet to make the transition to IBW from doing so. The report will function as a tangible, relevant ‘handbook’ helping all NMHS agencies take the necessary steps, in their own national contexts, towards meeting the WMO recommendation.

How to cite: Lowry, B., Ghimire, U., Bössner, S., and Hoy, A.: Assessing Best Practices of Impact-Based Alerting in Europe and Asia: A Case Study Approach, EMS Annual Meeting 2023, Bratislava, Slovakia, 4–8 Sep 2023, EMS2023-281, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2023-281, 2023.

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.

How to cite: Scannell, C., Lambkin, K., O'Brien, E., Nolan, P., Holloway, P., Ryan, P., Duffy, C., Griffin, S., and Delmar, J.: TRANSLATE: Providing Standardised National Climate Services for Ireland, EMS Annual Meeting 2023, Bratislava, Slovakia, 4–8 Sep 2023, EMS2023-296, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2023-296, 2023.

The Problem

In 2018 the Irish government introduced the National Adaptation Framework. This required the Government sectors to produce Sectoral Adaptation Plans. A first attempt at planning adaptation for many of the sectors, leading to an uncoordinated approach across the sectors. Upon review, the process was found to have provided frustration. The limited usability of climate services in the country, the many climate projection models to choose from and the absence of coordinated climate information made it a difficult process fed this frustration. Ireland to yet develop a standardised set of climate projections potentially leading to further difficulties in future decision making.

The Solution

The launch of the TRANSLATE project, led by Met Éireann – The Irish Meteorological Service, set out to translate the vast amount of future climate projections into a format that is useable, transferrable, and understandable. TRASNLATE aimed to do two things: A) develop a set of standardised national climate projections, B) develop climate services in Ireland suitable to the needs of the adaptation community in Ireland.

TRANSLATE was a finite project but opened the conversation around a national approach. It was agreed that climate services needed a more permanent footing to be able to build the required support structure – an operational solution. The Irish ‘National Framework for Climate Services’ (NFCS) gave climate services support a permanent structure to support adaptation.

The Implementation

The success of the TRANSLATE project brought together the climate service national stakeholders, encouraging collaboration, discussion on common problems. Ultimately, it led to an agreement on the required approach to climate service delivery in Ireland.

In June 2022, the National Framework for Climate Services was established after a government decision – tasking Met Éireann to develop and provide coordination for the service.

The NFCS for the first time provides a nationally coordinated approach to climate services in Ireland. Partnering with Ireland’s pre-existing ‘Climate Ireland’ platform to provide the standardised projections through the widely used adaptation portal. This serves as perfect example of how the NFCS will bring together the climate services community.

The NFCS will be a permanent centre for national climate services that will identify the users’ climate information needs, co-develop the tailored product identified and make these freely available. The NFCS aims to help users select and use the appropriate information in their planning and decision making by offering a freely available consultancy service in addition to the provision of climate data.

The NFCS aims to support a wide lens of users, from Government sectors to semi-state and private sectors. Through input from its many contributing organisations, support to the Local Authority in their climate action planning is drastically improved, with a major improvement in support to the Sectoral Adaptation Plans to come.

How to cite: Delmar, J., Lambkin, K., and Scannell, C.: An Irish National Framework for Climate Services, EMS Annual Meeting 2023, Bratislava, Slovakia, 4–8 Sep 2023, EMS2023-520, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2023-520, 2023.

We are excited to introduce a newly established initiative within the network Nordic Framework for Climate Services (NFCS), focusing on national climate services in the Nordic-Baltic countries.  

NFCS operates under NORDMET and has in the last few years cooperated within two activities related to new climate normals and heavy rainfall. With the completion of these activities, The Norwegian Meteorological institute (MET Norway) suggested revitalizing a previous activity focusing on climate services. In December 2022, the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) organized a workshop to establish a network and explore potential avenues for collaboration. The following countries were represented at the workshop and presented their respective national climate service: Norway, Latvia, Estonia, Iceland, Sweden, Finland, Lithuania and Denmark.

Climate change affects all countries and regions. Nordic countries (five) and Baltic countries (three) are located in the northern region of Europe, where the processes and impacts of climate change are quite similar.  Adequate provision of climate services can not only improve and strengthen knowledge about climate change, but also reduce the negative impacts of climate change. Communication, cooperation, exchange of knowledge and good practices among countries in the region can contribute to better knowledge about climate change and climate change impacts across the region. 

While the level of development of climate services varies across these countries, common concerns were also identified. Amongst common activities and concerns we can mention

• Updating the knowledge base for national and local climate adaptation following the Sixth Assessment Report from IPCC
• New sectors focusing on climate adaptation such as finance, insurance and health
• Increasing need for sector specific climate indices
• Data management and resources, code sharing and version control
• Challenges related to outreach and communication. 

At EMS we will present and compare national climate services of these eight countries and highlight opportunities for future collaboration under very limited resources.

How to cite: Dyrrdal, A. V., Paine, M., Rosin, K., Valiukas, D., Hygen, H. O., Ólafsdóttir, A. H., Matthíasdóttir, T., Wallin, P., Gaile, D., Jokinen, P., and Mändla, K.: New climate service initiative under the Nordic Framework for Climate Services, EMS Annual Meeting 2023, Bratislava, Slovakia, 4–8 Sep 2023, EMS2023-557, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2023-557, 2023.

The Australian Government's National Environmental Science Program (NESP) supports decision-makers by providing them with the best available information, based on world-class science. This helps Australian decision-makers to better understand, manage and conserve Australia’s environment. The Climate Systems Hub, one of four national environmental science research hubs, provides research to advance the understanding of Australia’s climate, its extremes and associated drivers, that will directly inform climate adaptation solutions for Australia.

Wide engagement with stakeholders has provided vital insight on how users want climate information delivered to enable widest possible uptake and increased impact. The climate information needs of users varies greatly with their level of technical expertise and intended applications. The most universally identified requirement is for a single location guiding users to the most appropriate, and sector-specific information, as well as to data at the appropriate level for their expertise and application. Calls for guidance, training, and support on how best to use information also emerged as pressing needs. 

To meet these user needs, the Climate Systems Hub is developing a gateway to deliver integrated training, guidance, and regional projection summaries. The gateway should help overcome barriers to finding and applying climate information in decision-making using the best available science and following good practice. This presentation will detail the key user needs identified through engagement activities, the recommendations drawn from these needs, a gap analysis, and review of existing climate data portals. We will also provide progress in co-designing integrated, tailored climate information and its delivery that fills a gap in the existing information landscape and meets the specific needs of NESP stakeholders.

How to cite: Murphy, B., Boulter, S., Burgess, T., Clarke, J., and Hoffman, D.: Delivering climate information needs for environmental decision-makers, EMS Annual Meeting 2023, Bratislava, Slovakia, 4–8 Sep 2023, EMS2023-595, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2023-595, 2023.

Historical climate data is fundamental for understanding local climate trends and extremes, and evaluating the impact of climate change on agriculture, food security and water resources. The data can be used for implementing adaptation measures for protecting lives and adapting socio-economic sectors to the changing climate conditions. While global climate trends can already be assessed with available data, regional data disparities result in blind-spots for climate change assessments and services—particularly for areas which are the most vulnerable. Coordination between countries is vital, since weather and climate phenomena often span country borders.

To contribute to filling this gap, International Climate Assessment & Dataset (ICA&D), with support from the EU-funded ClimSA Programme, is being extended to the climate-vulnerable areas of the Caribbean, the Pacific and in 5 sub-regions in Africa. ICA&D will be managed in each ClimSA sub-region by a WMO Regional Climate Centre (RCC)/proposed RCC. ICA&D stores for each sub-region validated daily precipitation and temperature series collected from the National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHSs) in that region. It provides an accessible, web-based mean to collect, prepare, quality control, and analyze the meteorological data. The ICA&D workflow was developed over 25 years ago by the Meteorological Service of the Netherlands (KNMI) as the backbone of the European WMO data-node of the RCC and implemented in Southeast Asia by meteorological service of Indonesia (BMKG).

WMO and KNMI are presently collaborating  to expand ICA&D to two pilot regions, the Caribbean (caribbean.icad-wmo.org) and West-Africa (west-africa.icad-wmo.org). The collaboration has led to setting up new websites which are designed to be user friendly and highly cyber secure. The websites, one for each region, consist of information platforms, including a geographical map with the locations of the stations’ datasets, a feature to quickly plot timeseries from derived data and an e-learning module on the website’s functions. The data sharing policy ensures that access to raw observational data from each NMHS remain restricted while allowing derived indices to be accessed by the public. With support from ClimSA, WMO and KNMI are facilitating the discussion on sharing meteorological observations.

How to cite: van der Schee, M., van der Besselaar, E., van der Schrier, G., Jepsen, L.-A., Ransom, C., Baddour, O., Allen, T., Van Meerbeeck, C., Suwondo, A., and Songoti, H.: ICA&D – The platform to collate meteorological datasets and provide climate services., EMS Annual Meeting 2023, Bratislava, Slovakia, 4–8 Sep 2023, EMS2023-504, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2023-504, 2023.

Snow is an essential aspect of skiing-based tourism, making it crucial for practitioners within the tourist industry to understand future snow conditions at different altitudes within their regions. However, despite an increase in the availability of climate change information on websites, such as the IPCC WGI Interactive Atlas, the spatial resolution and systematic errors in these products can limit their usefulness for practitioners.

To address these limitations, the ClimTour project has utilized post-processed data from Euro cordex to create maps showing projected future rain-, sleet-, and snowfall for the entire Norwegian mainland. These maps also show the distributions of rain, sleet, and snow at different altitudes in areas around selected tourist destinations. The project examined changes in the number of precipitation days and the average precipitation amount per precipitation day, as well as a combination of both factors, to determine changes in precipitation. The calculations were done on an annual basis as well as for winter (DJF) and spring (MAM).

By comparing coastal and inland areas at high and low altitudes, the project aimed to determine where and when snow will disappear. The results showed that the largest changes in the number of days with snow will occur along the coast in the north, while changes will be smaller along the coast in the south, where there are already quite a few snow days, and in mountainous areas, where temperatures remain below zero in winter. The percentage of snow will decrease the most along the coast, where it will become rare in some areas, and least in inner Finnmark and generally in mountainous areas.

Understanding these projections can help practitioners within the tourist industry plan for the future and adapt their businesses to changing snow conditions. Overall, the ClimTour project provides valuable information for the skiing-based tourism industry in Norway.

How to cite: Heiberg, H., Kuya, E. K., Hanssen-Bauer, I., and Mayer, S.: Rain, sleet and snow under global warming at Norwegian tourist destinations, EMS Annual Meeting 2023, Bratislava, Slovakia, 4–8 Sep 2023, EMS2023-523, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2023-523, 2023.