The EUCP (European Climate Prediction) project aims to provide better climate information to both scientists and users impacted by climate change and variability. It is providing new approaches to using climate predictions and projections, as well as some new climate simulations.
Predictions and projections of climate can help governments, businesses and other stakeholders better plan how to deal with the challenges and opportunities that a changing climate brings. EUCP aims to improve the information coming from climate predictions and projections from a year to 40 or more years into the future. Combining new research with better knowledge of user needs, the project will develop scientific approaches needed for a practical climate prediction system for Europe.
EUCP aims to develop a regional climate prediction and projection system based on high-resolution climate models for Europe which will support climate adaptation and mitigation decisions across all the nations of Europe and beyond. The scientific community will work closely with end-users through a participative approaches, representing the cornerstone of the project.
EUCP will focus on three main areas of innovation:
- EUCP aims to improve climate predictions for the next few years ahead (from a season out to a decade). This time-scale is vital for many decision makers. For instance, in the agriculture industry this is the time-scale over which new seed varieties can be developed and brought to market, or major farm scale developments, such as improved irrigation, can be made. In EUCP we have been looking at the sources of predictability out to a decade and trying to better understand how to extract the prediction information. We are also pioneering approaches that will allow users to more seamlessly use the information from initialised climate forecasts out to a few years ahead with climate projections out to a few decades ahead.
- EUCP is providing new, very high resolution regional climate projections, using a new type of regional climate model that is better able to simulate the convective activity seen in the real atmosphere and associated with extreme weather. In addition to performing and analysing new simulations that can be used for planning, EUCP is working closely with a set of super-users to take the information through to applications – for instance for urban flood planning.
- EUCP is exploring how to extract more useful and useable information from ensembles or collections of climate model simulations. Many studies simply treat or models as equally plausible and use the range of model projections to provide planning advice. In EUCP we are focusing on how such model ensemble might be constrained or sub-selected using additional strands of information, such as present day performance. There are several approaches to this in the literature and EUCP is comparing them. We are also applying storyline and narrative approaches as an alternative way of extracting and communicating model projection information for users.
Read more about EUCP: https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-18-0022.1
EUCP is a four-year research and development project, started in December 2017. The project is funded by the European Union under Horizon 2020 programme (Grant Agreement 776613).
Funded by the European Union under Horizon 2020.