Tracking Europe's changing climate
Thanks to the combination of observations from satellites and ground-based stations, the EU-funded 'European reanalysis and observations for monitoring' (EURO4M) project enabled researchers to put extreme climate events in a long-term historical context. This is the most complete dataset compiled to date to recreate weather and climate changes across Europe. Satellite data offer high spatial detail but go back to the late 1970s only. On the other hand, data from ground-based stations date back to the mid-19th century, but are spatially sparse and also maintained by individual countries. Most researchers do not have the resources to handle the terabytes of observations from different sources nor for model-based analyses that are computationally intensive. The EURO4M partners compared and evaluated data from all different sources and delivered the most complete climate change data series possible. These cover essential climate variables such as air temperature, pressure and trace gases. The great benefit of the data products developed is that they provide a consistent picture of the atmosphere in three dimensions as well as for variables that are not directly measured. Access to the datasets is available in the form of condensed reports that describe temperature variations over the European continent — the climate indicator bulletins. Longer time series of a wider set of climate variables are accessible through MediaWiki installed on the project website. A visualisation tool allows the creation of maps of separate datasets for comparison. EURO4M's climate information service will pave the way for the future climate component of Copernicus, the EU's initiative for the establishment of a European capacity for Earth observation. Datasets and data products are expected to serve as building blocks for the knowledge base of the Copernicus Climate Change Service. The goal of Copernicus is to provide information on our planet and its climate change that meets user needs on an operational basis. Policymakers, businesses and researchers need this information to mitigate the extent of change by addressing the main assumed causes and to cope with the unavoidable changing conditions of our planet.
Keywords
Extreme weather, satellites, climate change, trace gases, climate indicator
