Supporting mitigation and adaptation to climate change in Serbia through national climate service

Online platform Digital climate atlas of Serbia (https://atlas-klime.eko.gov.rs) has been established under the Advancing medium and long-term adaptation planning in the Republic of Serbia. This web platform provides free access to publicly available climate datasets over the country, both observational and projected climate conditions for the future as well as at the sub-national and city/local level. Digital Climate Atlas of Serbia is based on the data provided by CORDEX, Copernicus Climate Change Service and geospatial information system of the Republic of Serbia. Past and future data are gridded data and defined on the same spatial resolution grid of 0.11 degree. For the past condition the EOBS dataset was used, covering the period from 1951 to 2020. For the future projections data that was used is results from eight regional climate models from EURO-CORDEX database covering the period from 1971 to 2100. We selected two climate scenarios, RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 including historical part of model runs. Model outputs were bias-adjusted in order to minimize their error in relation to observed conditions in the past and then they were processed further. Available data are classified into two major groups. The first group includes the essential climate variables (ECVs), minimum, maximum and mean daily temperature and daily precipitation. The second one consists of 22 climate indices derived from ECVs, including some that are selected as a support for high-impact extreme events analysis. Both ECVs and calculated indices can be interactively displayed for different time-slices as maps of variable values and maps that represent changes compared to selected reference time periods. The atlas offers interactive display of relevant time series, enabling users to visualize data dynamically. Users can download any plot displayed on the atlas in digital picture format or as a dataset for further research. Spatial plots are available for download in NetCDF format to share array-oriented scientific data, while time series can be obtained in CSV format. Users can choose spatial levels on which the time series data are aggregated, such as national, regional and the level of municipalities, as well as single grid point time series. Atlas provides time series with daily, monthly, seasonal and annual time resolution.  The main idea behind the atlas development was to provide national climate service and free access to relevant data over Serbia that serve as the basis for all climate-related initiatives and can be used to support decision and policy making and vulnerability assessments. 

 

Acknowledgment: Digital Climate Atlas of Serbia has been developed in cooperation with the Faculty of Physics, Belgrade University and Neopix, under the project “Advancing medium and long-term adaptation planning in the Republic of Serbia” supported by the Green Climate Fund.