CLIP-C
The new European research project Climate Information Portal for Copernicus (CLIP-C www.clipc.eu) is a three-year FP7 project coordinated by STFC, UK. The project will develop a prototype portal to provide a single point of access for authoritative scientific information on climate change and related impacts, designed to match user requirements. A major component of the project is to harmonise access and processing of climate data from various sources: satellite measurements, terrestrial observing systems, GCM and RCM projections, and from global and regional re-analyses.
The Rossby Centre is leading the work on climate data transformations, which includes bias correction, methods and tools for calculation of Tier-1 climate impact indicators (aka impact-relevant climate indices) derived from from different climate data sources, and assessment of climate data quality and reliability, as well as producing representative reduced scenario ensembles. Together with the SMHI research department on meteorological analysis and prediction and National Supercomputing Centre at Linköping University, Rossby Centre is also involved in the climate data access component of the project. This involves extending and harmonising metadata standards to publish new datasets in a unified way, and to develop technical components for tape-to-disk data transfer. Last, but not least, we are, together with all partners, involved in developing and overseeing the knowledgebase that will document the data and tools available through the portal.
GLOBAQUA
Fresh water resources are vital to human wellbeing and quality of life. With a growing European population there is an increased demand on water resources with environmental and socio-economic changes related to human activity creating an additional load on the fresh water resources available. Water resource management should take into account different stressors on the aquatic ecosystem and especially complex interaction between diverse stressors. A new FP7 project – GLOBAQUA, which started on February 1st 2014, directly addresses water resource management under multi-stressor conditions. The project will investigate complex interaction of different stressors in order to implement water policy and optimise decision making in water resources management.
The GLOBAQUA kick-off meeting was held on the 18th & 19th February 2014 in Barcelona, hosted by the project coordinator –Agencia Estatal Conseio Superior de Investigaciones Cienttificas (CSIC, Spain). Representatives of 23 partners met together to discuss the first steps in the project and the vision for the next 5 years of collaboration. The GLOBAQUA consortium is made up of leading expert groups in climatology, hydrology, water quality, geomorphology, biology, ecosystems, socio-economics and integrated assessments.
The Rossby Centre brings its expertise in global and regional climate modelling and is responsible for climate modelling activities within the project. Climate changes simulations are a starting point in the chain of the GLOBAQUA work packages and will be used as input hydrological modelling, which in turn will provide output to other downstream work packages. The Rossby Centre will help in providing Euro-CORDEX simulations for all partners involved and also the best practice on how individual regional climate simulations can be selected to form ensembles that are necessary to assess uncertainties in future climate projections.
Today an important aspect of applying climate simulations in impact modelling is bias correction of model results. The Rossby Centre in cooperation with other partners will investigate a number of bias correction methodologies aiming to justify which are more appropriate for the GLOBAQUA tasks.
The Euro-CORDEX simulations at 12km resolution that will be utilised in GLOBAQUA have unprecedented high-resolution for a large ensemble of regional climate simulations. However, even 12km resolution may be not high enough for small river basins with many small-scale topographic details. To resolve this problem SMHI will produce a smaller ensemble with ultra high-resolution simulations at around 5km spatial resolution or even higher using regional non-hydrostatic climate model HARMONIE-Climate (H-CLIM).
HELIX
The Rossby Centre joins forces with 15 partners in the HELIX project that started on 1st November 2013. The kick-off meeting for HELIX was held at the University of Exeter at the end of January 2014. The project aim is to investigate the impacts of high-end scenarios at warming levels of 2, 4, and 6 degrees.
The Rossby Centre is leading WP3 (Klaus Wyser), which is related to global and regional modeling of timeslices centred on the warming levels. Another important contribution is the distribution of CMIP5 and CORDEX data, bias-corrected if possible, that will subsequently be used by impact modelers in the other workpackages. Risk assessments are planned at global and regional scales with the focus on Europe, Northern hemisphere sub-saharan Africa and South Asia. An important question is the occurrence of climate tipping points and possible early warnings.
Stakeholder engagement and communicating the project's findings are also an important aspect and the Rossby Centre will also be contributing significantly towards this work package. Eleanor O'Rourke will be providing support in: organising and running stakeholder workshops across Europe and beyond; leading the networking and training of early career scientists; and disseminating the project output to other FP7 projects and international initiatives such as CORDEX.
The temporary HELIX website can be found here.