Abstract

CLIPC will provide access to climate information of direct relevance to a wide variety of users, from scientists to policy makers and private sector decision makers. Information will include data from satellite and in-situ observations, climate models and re-analyses, transformed data products to enable impacts assessments and climate change impact indicators. The platform will complement existing Copernicus pre-operational components, but will focus on datasets which provide information on climate variability on decadal to centennial time scales from observed and projected climate change impacts in Europe, and will provide a toolbox to generate, compare and rank key indicators. Expanding climate data volumes will be supported with a distributed, scalable system, based on international standards. Guidance information on the quality and limitations of all data products will be provided. An on-going user consultation process will feed back into all the products developed within the project. The “one-stop-shop” platform will allow users to find answers to their questions related to climate and climate impacts data, and to ensure that the providence of science and policy relevant data products is thoroughly documented. Clarity of provenance will be supported by providing access to intermediate data products. Documentation will include information on the technical quality of data, on metrics related to scientific quality, and on uncertainties in and limitations of the data. A climate impacts toolkit will provide documentation on methods and data sources used to generate climate impact indicators. The toolkit will be made available for integration with Climate-ADAPT. The CLIPC consortium brings together the key institutions in Europe working on developing and making available datasets on climate observations and modelling, and on impact analysis.