The EUCP project aims to provide better climate information to scientists and to policy makers, planners and other users who may be impacted by climate change and variability. By providing new approaches to using climate predictions and projections, as well as some new climate simulations, the project aims to enable better adaptation planning decisions to be made in Europe and beyond. This new knowledge will benefit both public and private sector users, and is relevant over a range of spatial-scales from the regional level, the national level and down to local planning scales.
EUCP realises that providing useful and useable information about our future climate requires bringing together the providers and users of the information in an iterative process of co-development. Several of the partners in EUCP have built-up considerable experience in helping to overcome the challenges of scientists and users working together, using novel approaches to communication and creating balanced relationships between the providers and users which is being applied in EUCP.
Currently we are setting up the EUCP Multi-user Forum (MUF). This will bring together representatives from public bodies and authorities, civil society organisations, businesses, risk-related partnerships, financial organisations and academic institutions. The members of MUF will be able to work with the project scientists to influence the design of the climate prediction system that EUCP is developing so that it can be better used to support climate adaptation and mitigation decisions (for the coming decades). Part of the engagement will involve members of MUF being able to see the results from the project at an early stage and then helping to iterate them towards more useful products and evidence for making robust decisions. A subset of the MUF are more deeply embedded in the project as super users. These users are actively involved in co-developing examples of using the new EUCP data and approaches in real world applications, such as those related to urban flooding and coastal impacts.
Case study 1: Urban rainfall extremes from high-resolution climate projections
Picture by Ian Britton – https://www.flickr.com/photos/freefoto/8023044254/
Urban rainfall extremes are highly uncertain and difficult to simulate, but have the potential to cause damage to infrastructure, people and business. The latest very high spatial resolution convection permitting regional models in EUCP are able to provide improved information for these local extreme rainfall events. With these new simulations of extremes we will be able to derive Intensity Duration Frequency (IDF) curves to be used as input to urban flood models. EUCP are working with stakeholders for Scottish, Dutch and Italian cities to explore the added value of the latest generation of RCMs for urban flood risk assessment and build up experience of good practice in using the new simulations.
Case study 2: Translating multi-year predictions into drought indicators for the agriculture sector
A recently completed study in EUCP explored the usefulness of decadal climate predictions for forecasting European summer drought conditions using two drought indices: Standardized Precipitation and Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) and Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI). Both indices are considered user-relevant for understanding the evolution of droughts. The results show high skill for predicting five-year average (forecast years 1-5) SPEI across Southern Europe. Interestingly, for the same forecast period SPI exhibits high and significant skill over Scandinavia. In addition, the study illustrated the added-value of initialized climate predictions over non-initialized projections for building a reliable climate service for agricultural needs in Europe. The initialized decadal simulations have improved the predictive skill across several European regions during the summer months. In particular, a significant improvement in predictive skill of SPEI and SPI are found over Central Europe, and the Balkan region. Much of the benefit comes from the climate forecast systems ability to improve the summer precipitation and potential evapotranspiration forecast. Further details can be found at: https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ab5043
If you are a user of climate information and would like to be involved in the EUCP framework, please follow the link https://www.eucp-project.eu/get-involved-in-the-eucp-framework/ We would be grateful for your feedback and suggests on how we can improve our project to further benefit users of climate information.
Funded by the European Union under Horizon 2020.