Santander Meteorology Group

A multidisciplinary approach for weather & climate

Call Selected: FP7-ENV-2012-two-stage (ENV.2012.6.1-1)
Project Coordinator: Chris Hewitt
Science Coordinator: Carlo Buontempo
Project Manager: Paula Newton

ECOMS User Data Gateway

Recent advances in our understanding and forecasting of climate and climate change have brought us to the point where skilful and useful predictions are being made. These forecasts hold the potential for being of great value for a wide range of decision-makers who are affected by the vagaries of the climate and who would benefit from understanding and better managing climate-related risks. However, such climate information is currently under-used, mis-used, or not used at all. Therefore there exists the opportunity to develop new technologies to properly exploit emerging capability from the climate community, and more importantly, to engage with the users of such technologies to develop useful and useable tools. EUPORIAS will develop and deliver reliable predictions of the impacts of future climatic conditions on a number of key sectors (to include water, energy, health, transport, agriculture and tourism), on timescales from seasons to years ahead. The project will do this through a strong engagement with the forecast providers and the users/decision-makers, who are both represented within the project. EUPORIAS will develop climate services and tools targeted to the needs of the users, and will share knowledge to promote the technologies created within the project. EUPORIAS will also improve the users’ understanding of their vulnerability to varying climatic conditions as well as better prepare them to utilise climate forecasts, thereby reducing risks and costs associated with responding to varying climatic conditions. As a result businesses, governments, NGOs, and society in general will be able to better manage risks and opportunities associated with varying climatic conditions, thus becoming more resilient to the variability of the climate. The project will provide the basis for developing a strong climate service market within Europe, offering the opportunity for businesses to capitalise on improved management of weather and climate risks. The primary forecast timescale for the project is one season to one year ahead, with a secondary focus on the more scientifically challenging ~2-10 year timescale which is less likely to provide reliable information in the coming few years. The main study area is Europe, with a secondary focus on Africa, in particular with reference to food security, agriculture and disaster risk reduction.

Key achievements of the project:

• Develop and deliver reliable and trusted impact prediction systems for a number of carefully selected case-studies.
• Assess and document key knowledge gaps and vulnerabilities of important sectors, along with the needs of specific users within these sectors, through close collaboration with project stakeholders.
• Develop a set of standard tools tailored to the needs of stakeholders for calibrating, downscaling, and modelling sector-specific impacts on seasonal-to-decadal timescales.
• Develop techniques to map the meteorological variables from the predictions systems provided by the WMO GPCs into variables which are directly relevant to the needs of specific stakeholders.
• Develop a knowledge-sharing protocol necessary to promote the use of these technologies. This will include making uncertain information fit into the decision support systems used by stakeholders to take decisions on the seasonal-to-decadal horizon.
• Assess and document the current marketability of climate services in Europe and demonstrate how climate services on seasonal-to-decadal time horizons can be made useful to end users.

Contribution of the Santander Meteorology Group:
Our group leads WP32 and contributes to WP1, WP12, WP21, WP22, WP31, WP42 and WP44.

• WP32: Uncertainty Framework.
• WP1: Coordination and management of EUPORIAS.
• WP12: Assessment of users' needs.
• WP21: Calibration and downscaling.
• WP22: Impact relevant climate information indices.
• WP31: Quantifying uncertainty in impact models.
• WP42: Climate services prototypes.
• WP44: Delivery tools.

Our main commitments within these WPs are to coordinate the climate data flow (WP1), to establish an efficient communication with climate data users (WP12), to provide the impacts users with the required downscaled and calibrated climate forecasts (WP21) and climate-derived indexes (WP22), to assess the uncertainties involved in the latter process (WP31 and WP32) and to develop (WP42) and deploy (WP42) climate services for the stakeholders and end-users communities (WP44).

Deliverables:

• D32.1 (WP32): Report on assessment and combination of S2D predictions (M18, April 2014).

• D21.1 (WP21): Report on the skill of downscaled seasonal hindcasts (M42, April 2016).

Milestones:

• MS26 (WP31): Internal report on S2D uncertainty assessment protocol for impact models (M10, August 2013).

• MS12 (WP21): Provision of bias-corrected, downscaled data (M24, October 2014).

• MS29 (WP32): Deliver protocol guide for uncertainty analysis in climate predictions (M24, October 2014).

• MS14 (WP21): Provision of statistically downscaled surface climate data (in East Africa) (M27, January 2015).

• MS15 (WP21): Provision of statistically downscaled surface climate data (in Europe) (M30, April 2015).

• MS16 (WP21): Provision of derived climate indices using the meteo toolbox (M30, April 2015).

Internal Links:

• Management activities
• Support to End-users