Final Report Summary - CLIPC (Climate Information Platform for Copernicus (CLIPC))
Executive Summary:
CLIPC has developed a data services platform capable of providing access to climate information of direct relevance to a wide variety of users, from scientists to policy makers and private sector decision makers. Information provided includes 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 includes a toolbox to generate, compare and rank key indicators. The project has contributed to Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) development through a number of avenues. CLIPC focussed on centennial time scales from observed and projected climate change impacts in Europe. Expanding climate data volumes can be supported with a distributed, scalable system, based on international standards. Guidance information on the quality and limitations of data products is provided. An integrated user consultation process fed back into all the products developed within the project, and contributed to the smooth integration of a wide range of services.
The “one-stop-shop” platform allows 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 is supported by providing access to intermediate data products. Documentation includes 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 provides 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.
The front door of the data services platform is the portal at www.clipc.eu
Project Context and Objectives:
The platform design is guided by extensive and pro-active user engagement, described in D2.1 D2.2 D2.3 below. Through discussions informed by previews of technology options the users guided many aspects of portal services. The user requirements are balanced against the constraints of the scientific knowledge. Climate change and climate change impact scientists within the project have ensured that streamlining of services does not lead to key caveats about the data being hidden. Particular care has been devoted to creating appropriate services to deliver information on data quality and levels of scientific confidence (D8.4). A third foundational knowledge block is provided by scientific data standards which permit efficient combination of data from multiple science areas.
The data holdings delivered by the CLIPC platform include many archives which are not funded by the project: the aim has been to develop a platform for data services which can aggregate data streams from multiple sources. Specific technical advances have been made in the integration of archives on tape. The first terrace of user access services involves direct access to the computer systems that hold the data. CLIPC has not contributed directly to these services, but they form an important component of the overall system.
As an European project with a focus on developing prototypes for European climate services, CLIPC has worked with European institutions, but the scientific community has a strong dependence on global exchange of data. For the climate projections, this global exchange takes place through the Earth System Grid Federation, which provided single data discovery index and access interface for a globally distributed archive. CLIPC has contributed to some enhancement of ESGF services and has also developed more advanced downstream services which allow users to access global ESGF data holdings through a set of visualisation and processing services. The second terrace of user services provided by ESGF cover data discovery and bulk download for climate scientists. The data access services provided by ESGF work alongside documentation provided by ES-DOC (Earth System model Documentation: www.es-doc.org).
Between the ESGF federated archive and the CLIPC portal there is a further layer of service integration provided by the Climate4Impact portal, which has been developed primarily through funding from the IS-ENES and IS-ENES2 projects, building on the capabilities of the ADAGUC (Atmospheric Data Access to the Geospatial User Community) service package maintained by KNMI. The Climate4Impact portal (www.climate4impact.eu) provides access tailored to suit climate impacts scientists, which a search interface providing defaults appropriate to that community and protecting the user from the domain-specific abbreviations and code words which fill the ESGF search pages. In addition, climate4impact.eu provides a range of processing services and integrates data and documentation streams into a single set of web services complying with Open Geospatial Consortium standards.
The final layer is the CLIPC portal itself, providing a rich array of services tailored to meet user requirements in the context of scientific guidelines. Not all the data available through the platform is available through this final terrace of services: the user requirements implied a need to focus on the kinds of datasets most relevant to them. The terraced user access framework makes it possible to accommodate such user requirements and still maintain access to the full range of data, via lower terraces, for those users that want completeness rather than simplicity. Simplicity is relative: the top terrace of access through the CLIPC portal provides hundreds of datasets covering the 3 tiers of climate change impact indicators (Table 1.1) and tools to allow comparison, combination and ranking of indicators.
Project Results:
User requirements, Part 1
To create a well-functioning user-oriented portal for climate observations and projections data and an impact indicator toolbox, detailed knowledge of user requirements and regular feedback from users on prototypes of the portal is needed. A first deliverable from WP2 analyses experiences with user consultation and engagement, and users’ data preferences developed in earlier and ongoing projects and initiatives. These experiences show difficulties in effectively engaging users in a sustained manner. This document discusses the essence of the knowledge gathered in other projects on how to engage the users, and to a lesser degree, specific user needs of climate and climate impacts data and a climate and climate impacts data service infrastructure. 11 Projects have been reviewed in detail and another 55 projects and initiatives have been quickly scanned.
In the review four potential user categories have been considered:
A: Climate scientists
B: Impact researchers
C: Intermediary organisations (or “boundary workers”)
D: Societal end users
Definitions of these categories are provided in the box below.
Informed on the one hand by the available experiences from earlier and ongoing user consultation initiatives, and expectations about what CLIPC would offer on the other hand, the CLIPC project elected to prioritise categories A, B and C user groups. Category D is assumed to be reached primarily via intermediary organisations, like consultants, environmental protection agencies, research institutions involved in policy support. Within the three priority categories, most of the interaction will be with those users who are relatively easy to consult, which include potential users who are already part of the CLIPC consortium, those who are involved in related projects, and those which have European networks involved in European adaptation and climate services development.
A strategy for user consultation is outlined for categories A, B, and C. The approach and activities depend on the level of involvement in and the relationship with the CLIPC project. The potential users of categories A, B, and C already involved in the CLIPC project and those who are involved in related projects will be consulted through a combination of interviews and online questionnaires. Potential users from categories A, B, and C, who are not part of the CLIPC network will be reached through sessions and lectures at conferences and workshops organized independent of CLIPC.
The CLIPC user consultation and engagement strategy will focus on the quality and relevance of the CLIPC European portal in the English language and will not involve specific case studies or climate data tailoring activities which would require intensive interactions at a local level.
D2.2 User requirements, Part 2
The second deliverable from WP2 aims to describe and discuss the results of an inquiry concerning specific needs for climate data and impact indicators of different user categories. These user requirements will guide developers in the further design of the CLIPC portal and indicator toolbox. The methods that have been applied in the inquiry include an online survey, interviews and a user requirement workshop.
Results
All user groups indicate that access to information on the portal should be free and open and that it is important to create a sustainable portal with regular updates. There is a need for data of high (scientific) quality, data in a specific format, high resolution data and meta-data. Users also require tools to transform and visualize the data with post-processing tools. CLIPC should address the issue of standardisation of tools, colours and formats as well as harmonization of grids, calendars and treatment of leap years. Especially the need for a ‘guided search’ functionality of the CLIPC portal, including a help desk function and the use of case studies have been stressed. Personalization of the portal through e.g. the possibilities to save queries would add value to the CLIPC portal. The interviewees indicate to have a need for a sustainable portal with regular updates of climate information and research finding.
With a multitude of existing portals providing access to different sources of climate information, CLIPC should avoid redundancy with other portals. Therefore, most likely CLIPC will provide direct access to a number of reliable core data sources, harmonized meta-data and a set of post-processing tools, and indirect access to additional data sets. The added value would then be provided by a comprehensive overview of data supply, type of indicator availability and guidance. The combination of satellite and ground-based data and modelling results will also be an asset compared to what already exists.
Perspectives
The deliverable has set the foundation for much of the work ahead. Some of the findings and recommendations presented can immediately be taken into consideration by the developers of the portal. Specific design challenges include:
Different user layers allowing all types of users to navigate through the portal
Layers for direct data access and links to ancillary information
A (personalized) selection and browsing tool to maximize user friendliness
Feedback events are planned to enable users to assess new portal releases which will further shape the development of the CLIPC information portal.
D2.3 Synthesis report on users’ evaluation
The final deliverable from WP2 describes the methodology implemented to interact with users to create a co-developed portal, highlights main feedbacks from users and the lessons learnt.
The first part describes the project’s methodology, the second focuses on the results of consultation activities, with insights about the method (interactions with user) and about the content (users feedback on the portal and services).The last part proposes some recommendations to develop sustained users interactions.
The user consultation process in CLIPC focussed on organising a process to bring the users and the system developers together, and the final deliverable includes a review of this process.
Conceptual Design of the Portal (Deliverable 3.1)
The first output from WP3 was a report, jointly produced with WP 4 and 5, setting out the conceptual design of the portal (deliverable 3.1). It describes the technical and functional architecture on which the CLIPC portal interface relies, followed by separate chapters for the specifications and design sketches of the user interfaces:
CLIPC portal website
Content Management System
Accessing climate data: Climate data discovery and access to CLIPC dataset catalogue
Data viewing: Viewing datasets via maps and graphs
User authentication: How does CLIPC facilitate a personal experience
The binding factor: MyCLIPC data processing and visualisation
Guidance and education: Commentary information, technical documentation, glossary
The deliverable also defines who creates which software. The document is written to guide the actual development process with respect to the integration and use of the various CLIPC services from the portal (services developed in the different work packages). In each chapter the functional specification for services have been drafted, plus design examples of the user interface. In year 2 of the project members from WP3, 4 and 5 will in close collaboration work on actual development of the services.
The plans are not rigid because over time ideas might change and new techniques pop up. Therefore, during the development different solutions might be chosen. These changes will be documented in final deliverables. Other work packages are urged to make use of the ideas of this document. Ideas and plans will be discussed with the relevant project members.
D3.2 Vocabulary Discovery Services
The aim of this deliverable is to describe the improved functionality available from the NERC Vocabulary Server (NVS) in support of the CLIPC project. The CLIPC portal aims to deliver a data service layer across a range of datasets, which are produced by different science communities. These different science communities mark up their data using discipline specific vocabularies. The same applies to the employed vocabulary to populate meta-data fields due to the varying maturity of the communities regarding meta-data models.
The NVS already supports interoperability across a number of environmental communities; the marine community with the SeaDataNet (SDN) and Marine Environmental Data Information Network (MEDIN) vocabularies, and also the Climate and Forecast community by hosting the Climate and Forecast Standard Names. CLIPC Deliverable 5.2 has identified meta-data and controlled vocabularies for data, quality control and uncertainties in Earth Observation data. These vocabularies and mappings need to be reliably served and available to the community and the NVS is to be used to take on this responsibility for the CLIPC project.
CLIPC has funded improvements to the NVS Editor allowing authorized users to maintain vocabularies (insert, modify or deprecate terms) through a web form, either on a term by term basis or through a bulk upload feature. Before the recent development activity the NVS allowed for machine to machine interoperability through 3 mechanisms: RDF restful API, SOAP API and a SPARQL endpoint. A web based search tool (NVS Search) has been built to facilitate direct searches by users from their web browser. This has been built on the NVS SPARQL endpoint. Previously search results were returned as XML. The search results are now delivered with content negotiation, as RDF/XML in the case of machine to machine interactions or as html to a user’s web browser. The html that is returned allows the user to follow mappings between vocabularies as hyperlinks within the web page or follow hierarchies within concept schemes.
D3.3 Final user interfaces
At the end of the CLIPC project all services and the user interfaces are available under the CLIPC website www.clipc.eu. The user interfaces have been developed with expertise from CLIPC partners, based on services produced by WP4, data from WP6 and 7, and in close cooperation with users (consultations from WP2).
Deliverable 3.3 documents the status of the interfaces at the end of the project and these should be seen as a possible setup of how to bring data and services to the user. However, there are many other possibilities as well. CLIPC and the CLIPC portal have the goal the show the potential of services and standardisation to the community, and aims at uptake of the services and standards to C3S, EEA, and other possible stakeholders and users.
D4.1 Toolbox Interface Specification
The goal of the CLIPC toolbox interface specification is to describe a set of requirements on the CLIPC indicator toolbox developed in WP8 to be able to ease integration, configuration and updates in the CLIPC portal infrastructure.
The CLIPC portal infrastructure is described in D3.1 Conceptual design overall portal website with functional specifications. Also the specification documents from WP7 and WP8 have influenced the contents of this document.
To keep maximum flexibility in the CLIPC architecture existing international standards are used. These are the OGC Web Processing Standard 1.0.0 for encapsulating the calculation components, the OGC Web Coverage Standard for preparing input data and the OGC Web Mapping Service 1.3.0 for visualization.
For integration of the toolkit in the CLIPC architecture all of these services are relevant. For the actual components delivered by WP8 for performing calculations only the WPS are relevant.
The document is intended to inform the toolbox calculation component developers, providing them with details of the interface constraints.
D4.2 Effective Visualisation
Objectives
The objective of this deliverable is to develop guidance for user friendly visualisations:
1) to improve the communicative power of the data and indicators;
2) to visualise uncertainty information.
Deliverable 4.2 takes the user requirements following from WP2 into account and analyses what visualisations would be effective considering these preferences. It also takes into account the work done in WP6 regarding uncertainty visualisation.
Results
By making use of the results of WP2 and extensive experience with user consolidation efforts for the Dutch climate adaptation atlas we present several visualisations that are considered to match the needs of the different user categories. Climate scientists and impact researchers require more background information and details on meta-data and uncertainty, whereas intermediary/boundary organisations and societal end users have a need for more simple and straightforward data that they can immediately interpret and use in, for example, policy documents. Because climate scientists and impact researchers have the greatest need for Tier 1 indicators, which they already find in existing climate portals, the focus for the visualisation tool in CLIPC will be on Tier 2 and 3 indicators for impact researchers, intermediary/boundary organisations and societal end users.
The deliverable presents several visualisation methods for different user categories, ranging from bar graphs, line graphs to maps and compares three European examples of portals on their visualisation possibilities. It further presents a prototype visualisation tool based on the Dutch climate adaptation atlas which allows users to easily compare indicators, climate scenarios, time periods and climate impact.
Perspectives
The proposed visualisation tools will be developed in the coming months into a demonstration mock-up version that can be used for the user consolidation process. In this process users will be consulted on their preferences for the visualisation tools. This consultation will be completed in Month 24, after which the preferred options will be incorporated into the CLIPC portal. Reporting on the outcomes of this evaluation will be combined with the User Manual (which will contain a full description of the final system) in deliverable 4.3 (due month 34), but an interim activity report will be available at month 24.
D4.3 Visualisation manual
Visualization of climate indicators is one of the essential components in the CLIPC portal. This visualization needs to be standardized and high quality, in order to meet the user requirements.
For the CLIPC project the OGC WMS, implemented in ADAGUC [3], is used for all map visualization, time-series graphs and histograms.
ADAGUC (Atmospheric Data Access for the Geospatial User Community) is an Open Source geographical information system to visualize netCDF, HDF5 and GeoJSON over the web. ADAGUC is used because of its high performance visualization of remote OPeNDAP URLs, enabling fast visualization on large datasets.
For this, data needs to be standardized to enable automated visualization, styling and geographical projections. NetCDF is the required file format. These files need to comply with the Climate and Forecast conventions (NetCDF-CF). As many datasets from the CLIPC community are large datasets and available in NetCDF-CF, ADAGUC is an excellent choice for implementation. The software consists of a server side C++ application and a client side JavaScript application. Web clients like GoogleMaps, OpenLayers and Leaflet are supported and can directly use the exposed web-services.
Features of ADAGUC are: fully compliant OGC WMS and WCS, integrated data converters and post processors to support various data conventions, aggregation support.
Features developed in CLIPC context are GeoJSON polygon/vector visualization for ranking, tiling functionality for high resolution datasets, ensemble visualization in the CLIPC portal, histogram visualization in the CLIPC portal and the NetCDF Web Coverage Service (a key internal component).
ADAGUC is an Open Source package and can be easily installed. A fully pre-configured Virtual Machine is available and also many online tutorials are available to support developers. As such it has a growing user community, using ADAGUC in both research and operational environments.
D4.4 Integrated toolbox report
The CLIPC architecture has been build using Open Standards to provide well defined interfaces between data, service back-end and the end user portal. Data is provided in standardized NetCDF-CF format. This enables easy integration into the back-end services. The back-end services are provided to a front-end portal, enabling the CLIPC toolkit functions: Compare, Combine, Calculate indices and MyCLIPC.
The Compare functionality is provided by the ADAGUC WMS service, which is capable to automatically generate a WMS service on NetCDF-CF data.
The Combine functionality is a co-development with WP8. In the combine function two maps can be normalized and combined, using a combine function. At this moment 3 different normalization functions (none, min/max, Z-score) and 8 combine functions (Add, Subtract, Multiply, Divide, Multiply, Less, Equal, Greater) are provided. Besides the result, also the provenance meta-data is stored in the resulting NetCDF-CF file. The combine function uses the WCS and WPS standards for implementation.
Calculate indices is provided by using indices calculations functions from ICCLIM, using pyWPS as implementation for the WPS standard. For processing services a caching system was developed and tested.
MyCLIPC enables users to store, combine and calculate results and to check on longer running processes. The user simply logs in using a Google account. This functionality is provided using the StorageAPI of Climate4Impact.
All is secured using Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), OpenID and OAUTH2. The data and backend services are hosted at KNMI in the Climate4Impact portal and in the ESGF network. The CLIPC front-end portal is hosted and operated by MARIS, at a different location.
The use of Climate4Impact services and expanding on this framework enabled CLIPC to have a head start and a proven platform for development. The services can easily be expanded to provide new and improved services. Next steps include expanding the Combine services with compatibility guidance for the creation of sensible combinations (or issue a warning). A skeleton WPS has already been made available for this purpose.
D4.5 Link to Climate-ADAPT
In response to the call for better-informed decisions and evidence-based policy-making and action, current efforts are concentrated not only on the production of sufficient, relevant and credible climate data, information and knowledge, but also on the adequate and effective dissemination of these products. In addition to the traditional dissemination channels such as the publication of reports and journal papers, and the participation in project meetings and conferences, which target mainly members of the academic and scientific circles, recently we have observed an increase in the number of web portals and knowledge platforms developed to reach a wider audience.
At a theoretical level the potential as well as the usefulness of such web-based dissemination channels is well acknowledged and valid. Yet, the continuous and rapid increase in their number and the fact that most of them have been and continue being developed ‘in isolation’, without taking into consideration other existing portals and platforms, or their products and services, cast doubts on their real added value and, indeed, the need for them. Additionally, as many of the newly established web portals have been developed in the context of projects with a limited lifespan, their maintenance and updating beyond the end of the project funding period are often uncertain, if not unlikely, putting the sustainability of the portals and platforms themselves, as well as of the developments they host in question.
Establishing links between the well-established portals and platforms and those developed more recently may help overcome the aforementioned challenges up to a certain extent and allow portals to complement each other. This report presents part of the results of the task 4.3 ‘Impact Indicator Toolkit’ of the CLIPC project. Work Package (WP) 4, ‘Visualisation and Integration’, looks at the integration and visualisation of the data and components produced and collected in the context of the CLIPC. Within this WP, task 4.3 investigates among others, the ways through which we can link the European Climate Adaptation Platform (Climate-ADAPT) and the Climate Information Portal for Copernicus (CLIPC portal), namely to identify if and how the CLIPC developments (i.e. concepts and prototypes) can be integrated and operationalised in the Climate-ADAPT platform. The report presents some realistic proposals for this purpose. These refer to the submission of new items to the Climate-ADAPT database (i.e. Research and knowledge projects; Indicators), and the introduction of knowledge tools (i.e. Mapviewer / Time series; Indicators tool) and the update of existing content (i.e. Observation and Scenarios; C3S page; Uncertainty Guidance; Glossary) on the Climate-ADAPT website. Institutional and others links, some of which go beyond the boundaries of Climate-ADAPT, are also discussed.
D5.1 Climate Dataset Inventory
Deliverable 5.1 presents a summary of long term climate datasets identified by the CLIPC project as being of potential relevance for the creation of impact indicators and which can feasibly be provided by the project through the harmonised data access system.
CLIPC will provide access to data through several routes. The architecture is designed to avoid unnecessary data movement and duplication of storage costs. Data is distinguished in four major categories:
1. data which is held by CLIPC partners and will be (re-)published through the harmonised interface,
2. data which is available elsewhere through services which are compatible with the harmonised interface will be available in a transparent manner,
3. data which will be worked on in CLIPC and published by a CLIPC partner,
4. data which will be linked to, but will not be brought into the harmonised portal.
The data collections mentioned in the description of work are reviewed, and additional details on the plans for their incorporation in CLIPC are provided. Details of the harmonised data services will be in the architecture document, but the guiding principle will be provision of flexible access to the data, including sub-setting, visualization and bulk download.
D5.2 Meta-data and controlled vocabularies specification for data, quality control and uncertainties
The aim of this deliverable is to describe in detail the use of meta-data and controlled vocabularies for data, quality control and uncertainty information within CLIPC.
Since it is the aim of the portal to provide harmonised data search across a variety of different types of climate data records (e.g. climate model simulations, re-analyses and observational data) it is important that the discovery meta-data is complete and fully descriptive.
Controlled vocabularies play an important role in ensuring consistency across the different communities involved with CLIPC. Where different vocabularies are required or already exist, mapping relationships between the terms will enrich the data and facilitate the harmonisation of data access.
The wide range of formal and informal conventions in the different communities providing climate data presents users with a bewildering kaleidoscope of formats.
Whilst climate model datasets produced in the Coupled Model Inter-comparison Project, Phase 5 (CMIP5) conform to agreed data reference syntax (DRS) and controlled vocabularies, additional datasets considered and included in the CLIPC platform have required these DRS and vocabularies to be developed, and mapped to existing systems. Much progress has been made with the DRS, controlled vocabularies and mappings for a range CLIPC datasets, and in particular the European Space Agency (ESA) Climate Change Initiative (CCI) data.
The meta-data for uncertainties across datasets is not consistent. A case study of CCI data products is included here, and a potential way forward is proposed. Further progress on improving consistency and creating standard vocabularies for uncertainty will be made at an Uncertainties workshop in Hamburg in February 2016. It would be beneficial to include additional controlled vocabularies on the quality and commentary meta-data, this work will be pursued early in 2016.
Further work is also required on the meta-data, DRS and controlled vocabularies for climate impact indicators, for which a workshop is planned in Toulouse in February 2016 to help resolve outstanding issues.
D5.3 Publication of project datasets
This deliverable describes and demonstrates the publication status of the climate impact indicators published to the CLIPC portal. Within the CLIPC project, climate impact indicators are produced, and are made available to users through the CLIPC portal. A publication status table shows that on the 28th July 2016 55% of indicators have been created. All indicators are due to be available on the CLIPC portal by the end of August 2016.
Using the meta-data standards developed for climate impact indicators within CLIPC, meta-data for the indicators have been created and validated. The indicators are stored at KNMI, are harvested by MARIS and published in the portal. Much of the functionality of the portal has been completed and is demonstrated in this document through screen-shots of example searches in the portal. In addition to the climate impact indicators, associated uncertainty information are made available and are demonstrated in this document. The “compare” and “combine” functionality of the portal’s impact indicator toolkit are also shown through screen-shots.
As a result of the development of the climate impact indicator meta-data standards the bias-corrected climate impact indicator data produced within CLIPC (supported by the Bias-correction Inter-comparison Project) has been accepted by CORDEX and is now available through the WCRP CORDEX website1,2. These data can now be published through the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) for wider dissemination. Additionally, the meta-data standards developed in CLIPC are already being used in other international projects.
Much progress has been made in the publication of climate impact indicator data since the publication of the CLIPC meta-data guidelines. These ensure consistency across multiple institutions producing different types of impact indicators, facilitating the discovery of data on the portal and more widely.
D5.4 Tape Archive Interface
The climate modelling community is preparing for the next major model inter-comparison programme – CMIP6. This activity and associated modelling projects are expected to generate an archive in the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) over the next 5 years of at least 30-50 petabytes. Making this available online to users is costly and trade-off decisions have to be made.
Experience gained with the CMIP5 archive would suggest that a centralised online model may need to be adapted to make better use of the climate data produced and held by the modelling centres; specifically:
A significant proportion of the data held in the archive is rarely or never accessed; though the cost of submission, archiving and management of the data in ESGF is high and the modelling groups responsible for generating these data are also maintaining their own tape/disk archives.
Users outside of the groups involved in model inter-comparison often require data that has been produced as part of the MIP climate simulations but has not been requested to be archived by the CMIP5 project (especially high volume sub-daily data for use in regional simulations).
It is clear that the ESGF will need to adopt a different long term solution for providing data access, with heavily used core datasets held in the ESGF online disk archives, and the less popular datasets held in existing modelling centre disk/tape archives and only moved to ESGF when requested by users or a group within the climate research or climate impacts community. Given the wide scope of the datasets that may be required to support climate impact projects it is important that this approach forms part of a future CLIPC environment.
In task 5.4 of the CLIPC project, work was undertaken to develop two interfaces between ESGF and remote climate archives held on robotic tape archive systems. These two activities looked at different aspects of a future distributed archive extension to ESGF:
Linköping University/National Supercomputer Centre implemented a demonstration system that allows a user to request EURO4M data produced by SMHI and held in the MARS archive in GRIB format. Their SODA (System of Online Data Access) system enables a user to access EURO4M data in the MARS archive through the standard ESGF CoG1 interface. To achieve this, meta-data from the ECMWF MARS archive is transferred to the ESGF Solr database to be used in the data search systems. When a user requests download of data from the EURO4M dataset, it uses the standard wget2 mechanism of ESGF, but is routed through the archive-specific plug-in to the SODA scheduler and download management services.
Preliminary testing of this demonstrator has been completed, and it is the intention that the SODA service will ultimately become part of the ESGF software package.
The UK Met Office demonstration system looked at the issue of managing the distribution of climate datasets between the ESGF archives and the local modelling centre archives. This system has been deployed between the Met Office and the CEDA ESGF node, with the Met Office MASS archive system used as the demonstrator tape archive. The system allows the Met Office and CEDA to agree which datasets are routinely ingested into the ESGF archive and which data is held in the MASS archive. If the Met Office or CEDA receive requests for data held in the MASS archive, it can be made available and uploaded immediately. Care has been taken to consider the typical life-cycle of climate data, in order to deal with problems that are identified with data after it has been published. Functional and performance testing during 2016 has been successful, and it is the intention to use this system to support the management of all Met Office datasets for CMIP6.
Although the two demonstrators take different approaches to the problem of distributed access to climate data held in tape archives, there are common features that could be used to support a unified approach. For example, the interfaces developed for the Met Office demonstrator implement the services that are required for the SODA plugins in the LIU/NSC demonstrator. It would also be possible to configure SODA to respond to data upload requests from the modelling centre as implemented in the Met Office solution.
While the results of this work will be finding immediate application for the CMIP6 project, any future evolution of the CLIPC portal should consider the option of introducing features of both developments, in order to open up access to the wider range of data held in modelling centre tape archives.
D5.5 Interoperability Demonstrator
Deliverable 5.5 consists of two sections. The first one is related to the interoperability between Copernicus data infrastructures; specifically, we have demonstrated that Sentinel meta-data hosted in the STFC CEDA environment can be extracted and used to create a searchable catalogue in the Sentinel Data Access Service (SEDAS) environment run by the UK Satellite Applications Catapult.
This has been achieved by developing two new plug-ins for the SEDAS/archive4EO solution. The first plug-in logs onto the CEDA environment and copies Sentinel manifest files into SEDAS/archive4EO for ingestion. The second plug-in allows manifest files to be ingested by SEDAS/archive4EO. Archive4EO is developed by Deimos Space and has been deployed to a number of live environments where it has ingested and catalogued 10s of millions of records.
If required this proof of concept could be made live fairly easily. However some extra work may be required to ensure that the STFC service listing manifest files can be applied to a date or date range to allow new manifest files to be collected using a clear handshaking protocol.
The second section of the report concerns the activities carried out to extend the set of interfaces provided by the Ophidia Framework and how it has been used to calculate impact indicators in the context of the project. Specifically, to support users for their analytics and scientific operations on large volumes of data, the Ophidia Big Data Analytics Framework has been extended to support an OGC-WPS compliant interface.
With the aim of addressing interoperability aspects (e.g. within ESGF) in terms of data access and exposed services, this interface has been developed on top of the Ophidia server providing a web-based method for remotely submitting the execution of processes to the Ophidia platform and accessing the results. By means of the WPS interface, the Ophidia framework has been used to compute some impact analysis indicator starting from large input datasets (order of tens/hundreds of Gigabytes) like the SWE climatological mean, snow-off, snow-on and Length-of-snow-season, SST mean, anomaly and climatological mean.
The resulting indicators are available on the CLIPC Portal for downloading and further analysis and combine functions.
D6.1 Climate Model Data for Europe
This report documents the datasets published as Deliverable D6.1 “Climate model data for Europe, bias-corrected when necessary, for CCII-T1 calculation. Documented dataset”, where “CCII-T1” stands for “Tier 1 Climate Change Impact Indicators”. The focus is on bias corrected data at three different spatial resolutions:
i) global climate model (GCM) data interpolated to a common 2° × 2° grid,
ii) regional climate model data (RCM) at the Euro-Cordex 0.44° × 0.44° (~ 50 km × 50km) grid, and
iii) RCM data at the Euro-Cordex 0.11° × 0.11° (~ 12 km × 12 km) grid.
Alternative bias correction methods have been used by the groups contributing to this deliverable. The methods are described in detail and sample results are presented. They are substantially dependent on long high-quality daily reference datasets, spanning at least 20 years. For Europe well established datasets are available for temperature (daily mean, minimum and maximum) and precipitation. Hence, the report focusses on these variables. All methods produce a substantial reduction of the bias during the reference period. The bias reduction is one order of magnitude, and typically more successful for temperature than for precipitation fields. As expected, different methods do not result in exactly the same corrected data.
The bias corrected climate model datasets are currently available through the CLIPC webportal and will eventually become available through the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) web portals. The latter host the corresponding archive of the non-bias-corrected (“raw”) climate model data. The datasets published as CLIPC Deliverable D6.1 are the first based on multi-method bias correction of published Euro-Cordex RCM data at two spatial resolutions, and complemented by bias corrected GCM data.
These datasets are publicly available and can be further explored for many and diverse purposes. A straightforward application within CLIPC consists of deriving the Tier 1 Climate Change Impact Indicators (CCII-T1) based on daily precipitation and 2m air temperature provided by the RCMs.
The use of multiple bias correction methods enables a deeper analysis of the robustness and uncertainties associated with bias correction. As a consequence, the bias correction task within CLIPC WP6 provides a catalytic contribution to the Bias Correction Inter-comparison Project (BCIP) across a number of EU funded research projects.
Finally, CLIPC WP6 aims to explore the possibility of using the remotely sensed data as reference datasets to allow bias correction of a larger selection of model output variables where relevant reference datasets currently are lacking.
D6.2 Observation based CCII-T1s
This report documents datasets published as deliverable 6.2 “Observation-based CCII-T1s for the recent past and performance metrics for climate model based CCII-T1s, where “CCII-T1” stands for “Tier 1 Climate Change Impact Indicators”. Three types of data are discussed: CCII-T1s calculated from observational data, CCII-T1s based on climate models, and observational and re-analysis data used for evaluation and/or bias-correction of model-based indicators.
A number of satellite based datasets for climate change indicator indices were acquired and assessed and results presented in this document. There are several promising candidates among, e.g. the ESA CCI programme, ESA GlobSnow and EC CryoLand that were documented and also examined for application for bias correction of climate model data.
In addition to describing produced datasets this document examines the challenges inherent in comparing model-based data to observational/re-analysis data and using these datasets for bias-correcting model based data. Both re-analysis- and satellite-based datasets have their own errors (due to modelling-, sensor characteristics and limitations) in turning the raw observations to variables that can be compared with those provided by climate models. While satellite-based observations have the advantage of providing large, usually global spatial coverage and providing data from remote locations where observations would otherwise be sparse or non-existent, they have their own set of challenges that need to be taken into account, such as data caps due cloud coverage and low light conditions or those caused by given instrument’s chosen orbit. This causes another source of uncertainty that needs to be taken into account when bias-correcting model-based data.
Additionally, the length of time-series is often a problem, as bias-correction needs to have several tens of years’ worth of data in order to take into account the natural variability; whereas suitable satellite time series are typically limited in time coverage to at most a few decades. The work carried out is a fair start for a field that has not been thoroughly investigated so far. Several problems and issues in the data and approaches suitable for the work were identified and early progress shows that there is potential to utilize the unique satellite-based datasets for both bias correction of climate model data and an independent “ground truth” reference data.
All the CCII-T1s will be available through the CLIPC portal. The climate model data will be available through the CLIPC portal and the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) web portal. Observational data is available through either ESGF or individual institutions responsible for producing said data.
D6.3 Future CCII-T1 scenarios for Europe
This report documents the work on producing climate data that is focussing more on the needs of the impacts communities. The work has progressed along two main lines. Firstly, the development of methods and tools for processing the basic meteorological variables, like precipitation and temperature, to produce various impact-oriented measures or Tier-1 Climate Change Impact Indicators (CCII’s). Tier-1 indicators are those that can be calculated from climate data only (i.e. commonly available data about the physical climate system). In the second line of work we have developed and applied a procedure for finding reduced representative ensembles.
The work on CCII-T1 has produced three main results: i) work towards a community standard (extending outside CLIPC) for meta-data description of Tier-1 indicators. This work has been done in close collaboration with WP5, where the WP6 part concerns aspects that are closely related to the processing of the data. ii) a substantially extended and an updated processing tool, that also handles the stable components of the draft meta-data standard. iii) production of a considerable ensemble of Tier-1 indicators, based on unadjusted as well as bias-adjusted regional projections and representing both RCP4.5 and RCP8.5. This ensemble is now available through the CLIPC portal.
At an early stage in the work on reduced ensembles it became clear, not least from interaction with stakeholders, that the requirements were so diverse so that it was not possible to develop one ensemble that would fit all purposes. Instead, we developed a tool that would be flexible enough to allow production of reduced ensembles tailored to the specific needs and applications. The procedure was tested in a range of different case studies. Assessment of the ensemble spread (aka ‘uncertainty’) were partly hampered by the fact that the ensembles of regional projections were rather small (about 10 members) and further reduced to 2-5 members only. We have applied the climate signal map approach to assessing the robustness of the full input ensemble, but this method is not applicable to smaller ensemble sizes. An objective method for assessing the robustness of such small ensemble sizes is presently not available.
This result highlights the fundamental guideline to avoid as far as possible to reduce the available ensemble size. While reducing the ensemble likely will reduce the calculated spread of the ensemble, it will not reduce the underlying uncertainty as such, only make it less visible and thus reduce the information regarding robustness of the results. Sometimes however the circumstances dictate that it is impossible to make use of the full ensemble, in which case the ensemble reduction method may provide a way forward.
D7.1 A review of climate impact indicators
Objectives:
This deliverable has five main objectives:
1 - Elaboration of criteria for examining climate impact indicators.
2 - Documentation of an expert workshop involving relevant partners to discuss the criteria.
3 - Creation of a catalog of potential impact indicators to be made available via CLIPC.
4 - Assessment of strengths and weaknesses of climate impact indicators.
5 - Identify mismatches between user needs and the indicators documented.
Results:
In this deliverable, a total of 81 climate change and impact indicators are examined using a consistent set of reference criteria. These include aspects such as the methodological description of indicators, the data requirements and availability for indicator calculation, treatment of uncertainty, fitness for purpose of indicator time series and seven other relevant criteria. An analysis of previous work conducted by initiatives providing collections of climate indicators, and follow-up discussions in an expert meeting workshop, ensures that the criteria selected are in line with the core purposes of WP7.
The indicators were grouped in three tiers, with Tier-1 focusing on the climate system, Tier-2 indicators the impacts of climate change in bio-physical systems and Tier-3 indicators on the socio-economic systems affected by climate change. An analysis of the scientific and technical strengths and weaknesses of indicators was feasible but only at an aggregate level. As a particular strength of indicators gathered it can be pointed out that a large proportion of the input data for the indicators is in the public domain. This is mostly visible for Tier-1 and Tier-2 indicators. For half of the Tier-3 indicators documented some data restrictions have been documented. It should also be noted that the total number of Tier-3 indicators is relatively small in comparison with the other Tiers.
Indicator uncertainty is a key issue. In the indicator documentation, some information on uncertainties was available for approximately 2/3 of the indicators. The detail of description varies but in general information of uncertainty introduced by the indicator method and that related to the input data is documented. This particular aspect is to be further strengthened in the running of WP7 via more engagement on harmonizing the uncertainty descriptions. An apparent weakness of the indicators documented is the lack of regular updating. This is particularly the case when the indicators have been developed and presented as the output of specific research projects and not maintained by organizations responsible for monitoring or statistical data.
An evaluation of strengths and weaknesses on indicators-by-indicator basis has been proposed and conducted for particular cases. Its completion will need to expand beyond the time frame of this deliverable as an overarching activity of WP7 until the production of the CLIPC portal.
In an attempt to explore strengths and weaknesses of indicators further, we used preliminary results of the user consultation of WP2 in an attempt to evaluate indicators for specific purposes (as stated by users). Although the preliminary user consultation made it possible to identify general uses of indicators (e.g. production of risk and vulnerability assessments), details on particular applications of indicator by users are missing. Because only general uses are known, the evaluation of indicators from a user’s perspective suffers from our incomplete knowledge on how much weight a particular user might attribute to particular strengths and weaknesses. Despite these limitations, the deliverable gathered an extensive set of information on impact and climate change indicators and developed the approach for analyzing strengths and weaknesses of indicators. The documentation sets the standards of information in the meta-data to be included for the impact indicators in the CLIPC portal.
The sample of indicators gathered at the time of writing have been observed to match the user needs for using indicators as input for climate research and for the purposes of awareness raising. The uses of supporting the elaboration of adaptation strategies and vulnerability studies can already be supported by the indicators gathered, although in these cases it is still preliminary to make definitive judgements in the light of draw backs previously highlighted. Further interaction with users and subsequent updates of indicator documentation will help to clarify this.
Finally, in order to pave the way for data integration within WP7, two tentative developments of new impact indicators are envisioned, namely, an indicator of heat-stress of population and moth phenology index. A brief description of the types of data used for the calculation and the schematic steps for indicator calculation are presented.
Perspectives:
The deliverable has set the foundation for much of the work ahead in WP7 but also in WP8. An overall scheme for indicator documentation was put in place and a first large bulk of indicator documented. The next steps are the harmonization of some criteria in order to allow for a full use of the database in discerning indicator strengths and weakness on a more detailed level. This is a long term activity within WP7.
As long term perspectives, the work of WP7 will be focused on the completion and expansion of the review of indicators made in this deliverable. The completion will benefit from a longer time frame for filling missing relevant criteria information via more interactions with the partners. In addition, more detailed insights from ongoing user consultation will hopefully allow for a better matching of the indicator list collected to the user needs. The expansion of the indicator list will particularly focus on expanding the Tier2 and 3 indicators.
D7.2 The use of impact functions to develop Tier 2 and 3 indicators in CLIPC
Objectives:
The objective of this deliverable is twofold. First, the deliverable reviews the methodological challenges of generating impact functions. An impact function is described as a quantitative relationship between a climate or climate related stimulus (e.g. temperature or flood depth), and an ecological or socio-economic variable (e.g. economic loss or species distribution). The review identifies two approaches for establishing impact functions that can be used in CLIPC for the development of additional impact indicators. The first approach is based on establishing a statistical relationship between a climate variable, or Tier 1 indicator, and a measure of socio-economical or ecological impact for a particular large region, e.g. Europe-wide. Because socio-economic and ecological data is not always available across Europe at a temporal or spatial resolution required for a statistical assessment, a second approach was established. The latter uses impact functions that have been derived from statistics for a particular location and scale these up, either using additional variables or generalized assumptions, so that the function can be used at much larger spatial scales than that for which it was originally developed. In order to demonstrate potential applications, three impact indicators for CLIPC are elaborated these are: Moth Phenology Indicator, Threshold Mortality Temperatures, and Potential Economic Damages from Coastal Flooding.
Although work on the new indicators is still preliminary, it serves to highlight the benefits, and also challenges, of using impact functions to generate impact indicators. Therefore, the benefits, uncertainties, saliency, legitimacy, and credibility of each additional indicator are also described. The potential inclusion of each indicator in the CLIPC portal is discussed.
Results:
The indicators developed using impact functions are: Moth Phenology Indicator, Threshold Mortality Temperatures, and Potential Economic Damages from Coastal Flooding. These new indicators illustrate the approach and have a number of useful characteristics for potential users of the CLIPC portal.
The Moth Phenology Indicator illustrates that it is possible to project the timing of peak flight periods of moths using temperature observations and satellite data. The use of remotely-sensed variables (snow melt, greening) in the impact function makes it possible to determine the phenology of species over large geographic areas. Potentially practical applications include the management of pest insect populations in a changing climate.
The Threshold Mortality Temperatures indicator allows better contextualizing of heat data than purely temperature based indicators such as number of hot days (Tier 1 indicator). This shows that the salience and relevance of the temperature information can be increased through impact functions. Thus, the actual impacts on the population of a change in, for example, the number of hot days, will depend on the minimum human mortality temperatures. The indicator can therefore be interpreted as the current level of tolerance to heat by the population. Another asset of the indicator is that it provides a first order approximation of threshold temperatures in locations where so far no specific heat-mortality study has been conducted.
The Potential Economic Damages from Coastal Flooding indicator is determined via a systematic transformation of location-specific surge heights into an estimate of economic damages associated with different land-uses. The impact function estimates economic damages derived for specific areas can be generalised and compared with existing observations of economic losses from insurance or disaster data covering wider areas. In this manner, it opens the way for indicator validation. Using the empirical damage functions associated with different types of land-use and time horizons allows the support of discussions on urban adaptation to coastal flooding by highlighting different levels of adaptation, including actions that modify the function itself through preventive measures at the land-use scale that change the response between flood depth and economic damage.
Perspectives:
The approach described in this report suggests that the development and use of impact functions is a feasible and attractive way of increasing the relevance and salience of purely physical indicators of climate change (i.e. Tier 1 indicators). Impact functions can also be used to scale up detailed information from Tier 2 or Tier 3 indicators developed for specific locations to cover wider areas. Such indicators have been developed and published in the scientific literature by various authors, but the data are generally not publicly available and can therefore not easily be included in CLIPC.
Caution is warranted in interpreting indicators based on impact functions as there are significant uncertainties related to the data, the choice and estimation of the impact function and the attribution of impacts to climate change. But because of the attractiveness of enabling users to explore new impact indicators in a quick way on their own, it is recommended to further explore opportunities for combining Tier 1 indicators with other information to produce Tier 2 and 3 indicators based on impact functions. However, despite some promising work the challenges in using impact function for constructing higher Tier indicators should not be underestimated. This report provides ideas for how indicators can be generated using impact functions, but the specific methods will depend strongly on the nature of the impact to be evaluated and on the availability of data.
D7.3 Toolkit indicator module
Objectives
The objectives of this deliverable are to describe our work-flow from the production of a climate impact indicator to its publication in the CLIPC portal and use by the toolkit. In particular 1) coordinating and providing data to the CLIPC toolkit following the meta-data-standards established in WP5, and 2) providing the expert-based confidence assessment for a sub-set of indicators following the template provided by WP8.
Results
The provision of impact indicators with a harmonized meta-data underpins the adequate functioning of CLIPC indicator toolkit and functions within. In total the 71 climate impact indicators (including 3 Tiers and also socio-economic sensitivity data) are made available for the CLIPC portal and toolkit and compliant with the meta-data standards established in WP5 and WP6 (see distribution in Figure 1). Also, the expert-based information about uncertainty and confidence is available for a subset of the indicators. This uncertainty assessment is created after the specifications described in WP8. Specifications include the enumeration of predefined sources of uncertainty (e.g. external uncertainty or external natural forcing), their nature (e.g. unpredictability, stochasticity), and a final expert statement on the overall degree of confidence in the dataset. These assessments are now integral part of the CLIPC portal and can be consulted in the CLIPC toolkit. The documentation database to trace the progress of indicators across the established workflow was established and is available on line: https://goo.gl/8X0xT9
Perspectives
It is expected that tracking the progress of indicators from production to portal publication might help forthcoming projects on the optimization of their own workflow. Moreover, the challenges and barriers described when attempting to follow the CLIPC workflow warn future similar initiatives of potential pitfalls to consider and suggest potential solutions.
D7.4 Guidance on production and use of indicators
Objectives:
The objectives of this deliverable can be summarized as follows:
To develop stylized guidance on the use and production of indicators.
To tailor the guidance according the needs of CLIPC user groups climate scientists, impacts researchers and intermediary organizations.
To enumerate the CLIPC functionalities and data required in order to operate the stylized guidance.
To practically illustrate the guidance steps in the CLIPC portal.
To formulate suggestions for future work concerning provision of guidance to end-users.
Results:
Building on the specific requirements of potential users, this deliverable elaborates structured guidance on 4 simulated tasks regarding the use and production of climate impact indicators in the CLIPC portal. These tasks use concrete “data usage purposes” suggested by potential end-users in D2.2 User requirements, Part 2. The tasks have been structured according to the potential user-groups of CLIPC, and can be summarized as follows:
Give advice on data and climate impact indicators to others (Intermediary organizations, Climate Scientists and Impacts researchers)
Create awareness (Intermediary organizations)
Perform risk and vulnerability assessments (Impact researchers)
Input in research on climate change (Impact researchers)
In addition, a section elaborates how to derive relevant information from the file name of CLIPC datasets, guidance requested by the users during the consultations.
Perspectives:
With the need for guidance taking a very prominent role during the elaboration of the CLIPC portal and the user consultations, it is expected that a similar requirement from the side of end-users will emerge in forthcoming work promoting the use of climate information portals to wider audiences. Accordingly, the examples of guidance on the use and elaboration of impact indicators by user group can facilitate future similar work.
D8.1 Impact models and aggregation
Deliverable D8.1 represents an intersection point between indicator documentation (WP7) and indicator exploration (WP8). Its aim was to analyze the indicators documented in WP7 and determine to which degree they are compatible with one another in order to inform the development of tools for indicator exploration and aggregation (see MS34).
Deliverable D8.1 therefore needed to develop and apply a methodology which operationalizes the degree of compatibility between indicators. For this each of the 89 climate impact indicators compiled within the framework of D7.1 had to be analyzed in relation to all other indicators.
Six determinants of indicator compatibility were identified. For each determinant the relevant issues were discussed and a suitable compatibility classification scheme was developed. For each determinant all climate impact indicators currently included in the indicator database of D7.1 were related to each other and assessed in regard to their degree of compatibility.
The majority of fully documented pairs of indicators from D7.1 were found to be compatible in regard to time periods, spatial extents, treatment of adaptive capacity, underlying scenarios, data types and conceptual frameworks when considered separately. Of course mere compatibility between particular indicators does not necessarily mean that it makes sense to compare or combine them. Therefore, the results of D8.1 provided only a first basis for the development of tools in Tasks 8.2 and 8.3 and for developing more in-depth user guidance on how to meaningfully relate indicators to each other.
D8.2 Scenario based indicator exploration
This deliverable documents data and tools developed by the CLIPC project for exploring scenario-based indicators.
The first part of the report gave an overview of the various climatic, demographic, socio-economic and land-use scenario data that were developed and/or post-processed for the CLIPC portal. The underlying scenarios and methodologies are explained, including how the data were spatially disaggregated to comparable resolutions.
The second part introduced various web-based tools of the CLIPC portal that allow users to explore scenario-based data. The report described in detail a) different ways of using the interactive CLIPC map viewer for scenario indicator exploration, b) a tailor-made scenario viewer that allows easy visual exploration of different time periods and scenarios of an indicator, c) more refined exploration of one indicator or comparisons between different indicators by using the CLIPC comparison tool, and finally d) calculation of residuals and corresponding residual maps for more accurate exploration of differences e.g. between time periods.
D8.3 Comparison, ranking and aggregation of impact indicators
This deliverable documents and explains the comparison, combination, aggregation and ranking tools of the CLIPC portal in detail. The tools differ in complexity and flexibility and thus allow users of different experience and skill levels to interrelate and compare data available in the CLIPC portal. All tools are implemented as web-based, dynamic tools that produce results ‘on the fly’ in response to users’ interaction.
In particular the deliverable explains how to use the CLIPC toolkit to (a) conduct visual and statistical comparisons of indicators, (b) conduct metadata comparisons, (c) calculate and visualise temporal changes, (d) calculate and visualise changes between different RCPs, (e) combine two climatic indicators in order to create and visualise a new composite indicator, (f) combine climate change exposure and sensitivity indicators in order to create and visualise a new tier 3 climate change impact indicator (g) conduct a quick compatibility check of the selected input indicators, (h) aggregate and visualise newly created indicators at district/county level and country level, (i) display and sort individual results of the above tools and (j) download statistical results, maps and protocols for each newly created indicator.
For users that otherwise do not have access to a large variety of state-of-the art climate change related data or do not have the necessary infrastructure or skills for more sophisticated analysis, the CLIP-C portal documented in this deliverable provides a carefully curated set of data and easy to use tools for a first interactive exploration and analysis of climate change impacts in Europe.
The report explains the functionalities and user guidance, while Milestone 38 chronicles the ‘evolution’ of each tool and Deliverable 3.3 documents the tools’ interfaces in detail. How these tools can be used in representative use cases is documented in Milestone 40.
D8.4 Uncertainty assessment of climate impact indicators
Aim and Objective
This deliverables summarises how the CLIPC project dealt and engaged with the topic ‘uncertainty1’ and how it is presented and communicated in the final version of the CLIPC portal. This deliverable is a constituent part of Work Package 8 (WP8) summarising the results of task 8.4 ‘Development of tools specifying uncertainties of climate impact
indicators’. The specific objectives of task 8.4 include:
a) Development of a methodology and tools to specify the uncertainty of climate change impact indicators developed in WP7 and WP8 with a tailor-made analysis to identify and communicate uncertainties of impact indicators
b) Statistical estimation of the robustness of tier 1 climate impact indicators based on different climate model scenarios covered in WP6
The development steps and first implementations of the methodology are described in detail in three previous milestones (MS34, MS37 & MS 39). Prime concept ideas of presenting uncertainty with confidence are described in MS34. The methodology of providing confidence information for the climate impact indicators is based on a questionnaire and user consultations as described in MS37. The subsequent MS39 presents the work-flow of the implementation of the expert-based confidence information into the CLIPC portal.
The strategy how the CLIPC project engaged with uncertainties and how the management of confidence information is presented in the final version of the CLIPC portal is the main object of this deliverable 8.4.
Potential Impact:
Within C3S: through tenders
CLIPC partners are contributing to C3S through a number of sub-contracts.
Within C3S: through adoption
CLIPC has engaged with C3S throughout the project, and in the final months held a series of meetings to discuss how C3S could exploit project foreground. C3S has expressed interest in 3 main areas:
User engagement;
C3S are interested in the process of continuous engagement developed in CLIPC. Discussions with ALTERRA are ongoing.
Standards framework;
The standards framework used by CLIPC creates a rich meta-data structure which is embedded in data files, enabling robust automated processing. STFC is in discussion with C3S.
Data provenance workflow
The processing service developed in CLIPC embeds provenance information in files which enables processes to be re-run automatically. KNMI is in discussion with C3S.
List of Websites:
www.clipc.eu
CLIPC has developed a data services platform capable of providing access to climate information of direct relevance to a wide variety of users, from scientists to policy makers and private sector decision makers. Information provided includes 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 includes a toolbox to generate, compare and rank key indicators. The project has contributed to Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) development through a number of avenues. CLIPC focussed on centennial time scales from observed and projected climate change impacts in Europe. Expanding climate data volumes can be supported with a distributed, scalable system, based on international standards. Guidance information on the quality and limitations of data products is provided. An integrated user consultation process fed back into all the products developed within the project, and contributed to the smooth integration of a wide range of services.
The “one-stop-shop” platform allows 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 is supported by providing access to intermediate data products. Documentation includes 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 provides 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.
The front door of the data services platform is the portal at www.clipc.eu
Project Context and Objectives:
The platform design is guided by extensive and pro-active user engagement, described in D2.1 D2.2 D2.3 below. Through discussions informed by previews of technology options the users guided many aspects of portal services. The user requirements are balanced against the constraints of the scientific knowledge. Climate change and climate change impact scientists within the project have ensured that streamlining of services does not lead to key caveats about the data being hidden. Particular care has been devoted to creating appropriate services to deliver information on data quality and levels of scientific confidence (D8.4). A third foundational knowledge block is provided by scientific data standards which permit efficient combination of data from multiple science areas.
The data holdings delivered by the CLIPC platform include many archives which are not funded by the project: the aim has been to develop a platform for data services which can aggregate data streams from multiple sources. Specific technical advances have been made in the integration of archives on tape. The first terrace of user access services involves direct access to the computer systems that hold the data. CLIPC has not contributed directly to these services, but they form an important component of the overall system.
As an European project with a focus on developing prototypes for European climate services, CLIPC has worked with European institutions, but the scientific community has a strong dependence on global exchange of data. For the climate projections, this global exchange takes place through the Earth System Grid Federation, which provided single data discovery index and access interface for a globally distributed archive. CLIPC has contributed to some enhancement of ESGF services and has also developed more advanced downstream services which allow users to access global ESGF data holdings through a set of visualisation and processing services. The second terrace of user services provided by ESGF cover data discovery and bulk download for climate scientists. The data access services provided by ESGF work alongside documentation provided by ES-DOC (Earth System model Documentation: www.es-doc.org).
Between the ESGF federated archive and the CLIPC portal there is a further layer of service integration provided by the Climate4Impact portal, which has been developed primarily through funding from the IS-ENES and IS-ENES2 projects, building on the capabilities of the ADAGUC (Atmospheric Data Access to the Geospatial User Community) service package maintained by KNMI. The Climate4Impact portal (www.climate4impact.eu) provides access tailored to suit climate impacts scientists, which a search interface providing defaults appropriate to that community and protecting the user from the domain-specific abbreviations and code words which fill the ESGF search pages. In addition, climate4impact.eu provides a range of processing services and integrates data and documentation streams into a single set of web services complying with Open Geospatial Consortium standards.
The final layer is the CLIPC portal itself, providing a rich array of services tailored to meet user requirements in the context of scientific guidelines. Not all the data available through the platform is available through this final terrace of services: the user requirements implied a need to focus on the kinds of datasets most relevant to them. The terraced user access framework makes it possible to accommodate such user requirements and still maintain access to the full range of data, via lower terraces, for those users that want completeness rather than simplicity. Simplicity is relative: the top terrace of access through the CLIPC portal provides hundreds of datasets covering the 3 tiers of climate change impact indicators (Table 1.1) and tools to allow comparison, combination and ranking of indicators.
Project Results:
User requirements, Part 1
To create a well-functioning user-oriented portal for climate observations and projections data and an impact indicator toolbox, detailed knowledge of user requirements and regular feedback from users on prototypes of the portal is needed. A first deliverable from WP2 analyses experiences with user consultation and engagement, and users’ data preferences developed in earlier and ongoing projects and initiatives. These experiences show difficulties in effectively engaging users in a sustained manner. This document discusses the essence of the knowledge gathered in other projects on how to engage the users, and to a lesser degree, specific user needs of climate and climate impacts data and a climate and climate impacts data service infrastructure. 11 Projects have been reviewed in detail and another 55 projects and initiatives have been quickly scanned.
In the review four potential user categories have been considered:
A: Climate scientists
B: Impact researchers
C: Intermediary organisations (or “boundary workers”)
D: Societal end users
Definitions of these categories are provided in the box below.
Informed on the one hand by the available experiences from earlier and ongoing user consultation initiatives, and expectations about what CLIPC would offer on the other hand, the CLIPC project elected to prioritise categories A, B and C user groups. Category D is assumed to be reached primarily via intermediary organisations, like consultants, environmental protection agencies, research institutions involved in policy support. Within the three priority categories, most of the interaction will be with those users who are relatively easy to consult, which include potential users who are already part of the CLIPC consortium, those who are involved in related projects, and those which have European networks involved in European adaptation and climate services development.
A strategy for user consultation is outlined for categories A, B, and C. The approach and activities depend on the level of involvement in and the relationship with the CLIPC project. The potential users of categories A, B, and C already involved in the CLIPC project and those who are involved in related projects will be consulted through a combination of interviews and online questionnaires. Potential users from categories A, B, and C, who are not part of the CLIPC network will be reached through sessions and lectures at conferences and workshops organized independent of CLIPC.
The CLIPC user consultation and engagement strategy will focus on the quality and relevance of the CLIPC European portal in the English language and will not involve specific case studies or climate data tailoring activities which would require intensive interactions at a local level.
D2.2 User requirements, Part 2
The second deliverable from WP2 aims to describe and discuss the results of an inquiry concerning specific needs for climate data and impact indicators of different user categories. These user requirements will guide developers in the further design of the CLIPC portal and indicator toolbox. The methods that have been applied in the inquiry include an online survey, interviews and a user requirement workshop.
Results
All user groups indicate that access to information on the portal should be free and open and that it is important to create a sustainable portal with regular updates. There is a need for data of high (scientific) quality, data in a specific format, high resolution data and meta-data. Users also require tools to transform and visualize the data with post-processing tools. CLIPC should address the issue of standardisation of tools, colours and formats as well as harmonization of grids, calendars and treatment of leap years. Especially the need for a ‘guided search’ functionality of the CLIPC portal, including a help desk function and the use of case studies have been stressed. Personalization of the portal through e.g. the possibilities to save queries would add value to the CLIPC portal. The interviewees indicate to have a need for a sustainable portal with regular updates of climate information and research finding.
With a multitude of existing portals providing access to different sources of climate information, CLIPC should avoid redundancy with other portals. Therefore, most likely CLIPC will provide direct access to a number of reliable core data sources, harmonized meta-data and a set of post-processing tools, and indirect access to additional data sets. The added value would then be provided by a comprehensive overview of data supply, type of indicator availability and guidance. The combination of satellite and ground-based data and modelling results will also be an asset compared to what already exists.
Perspectives
The deliverable has set the foundation for much of the work ahead. Some of the findings and recommendations presented can immediately be taken into consideration by the developers of the portal. Specific design challenges include:
Different user layers allowing all types of users to navigate through the portal
Layers for direct data access and links to ancillary information
A (personalized) selection and browsing tool to maximize user friendliness
Feedback events are planned to enable users to assess new portal releases which will further shape the development of the CLIPC information portal.
D2.3 Synthesis report on users’ evaluation
The final deliverable from WP2 describes the methodology implemented to interact with users to create a co-developed portal, highlights main feedbacks from users and the lessons learnt.
The first part describes the project’s methodology, the second focuses on the results of consultation activities, with insights about the method (interactions with user) and about the content (users feedback on the portal and services).The last part proposes some recommendations to develop sustained users interactions.
The user consultation process in CLIPC focussed on organising a process to bring the users and the system developers together, and the final deliverable includes a review of this process.
Conceptual Design of the Portal (Deliverable 3.1)
The first output from WP3 was a report, jointly produced with WP 4 and 5, setting out the conceptual design of the portal (deliverable 3.1). It describes the technical and functional architecture on which the CLIPC portal interface relies, followed by separate chapters for the specifications and design sketches of the user interfaces:
CLIPC portal website
Content Management System
Accessing climate data: Climate data discovery and access to CLIPC dataset catalogue
Data viewing: Viewing datasets via maps and graphs
User authentication: How does CLIPC facilitate a personal experience
The binding factor: MyCLIPC data processing and visualisation
Guidance and education: Commentary information, technical documentation, glossary
The deliverable also defines who creates which software. The document is written to guide the actual development process with respect to the integration and use of the various CLIPC services from the portal (services developed in the different work packages). In each chapter the functional specification for services have been drafted, plus design examples of the user interface. In year 2 of the project members from WP3, 4 and 5 will in close collaboration work on actual development of the services.
The plans are not rigid because over time ideas might change and new techniques pop up. Therefore, during the development different solutions might be chosen. These changes will be documented in final deliverables. Other work packages are urged to make use of the ideas of this document. Ideas and plans will be discussed with the relevant project members.
D3.2 Vocabulary Discovery Services
The aim of this deliverable is to describe the improved functionality available from the NERC Vocabulary Server (NVS) in support of the CLIPC project. The CLIPC portal aims to deliver a data service layer across a range of datasets, which are produced by different science communities. These different science communities mark up their data using discipline specific vocabularies. The same applies to the employed vocabulary to populate meta-data fields due to the varying maturity of the communities regarding meta-data models.
The NVS already supports interoperability across a number of environmental communities; the marine community with the SeaDataNet (SDN) and Marine Environmental Data Information Network (MEDIN) vocabularies, and also the Climate and Forecast community by hosting the Climate and Forecast Standard Names. CLIPC Deliverable 5.2 has identified meta-data and controlled vocabularies for data, quality control and uncertainties in Earth Observation data. These vocabularies and mappings need to be reliably served and available to the community and the NVS is to be used to take on this responsibility for the CLIPC project.
CLIPC has funded improvements to the NVS Editor allowing authorized users to maintain vocabularies (insert, modify or deprecate terms) through a web form, either on a term by term basis or through a bulk upload feature. Before the recent development activity the NVS allowed for machine to machine interoperability through 3 mechanisms: RDF restful API, SOAP API and a SPARQL endpoint. A web based search tool (NVS Search) has been built to facilitate direct searches by users from their web browser. This has been built on the NVS SPARQL endpoint. Previously search results were returned as XML. The search results are now delivered with content negotiation, as RDF/XML in the case of machine to machine interactions or as html to a user’s web browser. The html that is returned allows the user to follow mappings between vocabularies as hyperlinks within the web page or follow hierarchies within concept schemes.
D3.3 Final user interfaces
At the end of the CLIPC project all services and the user interfaces are available under the CLIPC website www.clipc.eu. The user interfaces have been developed with expertise from CLIPC partners, based on services produced by WP4, data from WP6 and 7, and in close cooperation with users (consultations from WP2).
Deliverable 3.3 documents the status of the interfaces at the end of the project and these should be seen as a possible setup of how to bring data and services to the user. However, there are many other possibilities as well. CLIPC and the CLIPC portal have the goal the show the potential of services and standardisation to the community, and aims at uptake of the services and standards to C3S, EEA, and other possible stakeholders and users.
D4.1 Toolbox Interface Specification
The goal of the CLIPC toolbox interface specification is to describe a set of requirements on the CLIPC indicator toolbox developed in WP8 to be able to ease integration, configuration and updates in the CLIPC portal infrastructure.
The CLIPC portal infrastructure is described in D3.1 Conceptual design overall portal website with functional specifications. Also the specification documents from WP7 and WP8 have influenced the contents of this document.
To keep maximum flexibility in the CLIPC architecture existing international standards are used. These are the OGC Web Processing Standard 1.0.0 for encapsulating the calculation components, the OGC Web Coverage Standard for preparing input data and the OGC Web Mapping Service 1.3.0 for visualization.
For integration of the toolkit in the CLIPC architecture all of these services are relevant. For the actual components delivered by WP8 for performing calculations only the WPS are relevant.
The document is intended to inform the toolbox calculation component developers, providing them with details of the interface constraints.
D4.2 Effective Visualisation
Objectives
The objective of this deliverable is to develop guidance for user friendly visualisations:
1) to improve the communicative power of the data and indicators;
2) to visualise uncertainty information.
Deliverable 4.2 takes the user requirements following from WP2 into account and analyses what visualisations would be effective considering these preferences. It also takes into account the work done in WP6 regarding uncertainty visualisation.
Results
By making use of the results of WP2 and extensive experience with user consolidation efforts for the Dutch climate adaptation atlas we present several visualisations that are considered to match the needs of the different user categories. Climate scientists and impact researchers require more background information and details on meta-data and uncertainty, whereas intermediary/boundary organisations and societal end users have a need for more simple and straightforward data that they can immediately interpret and use in, for example, policy documents. Because climate scientists and impact researchers have the greatest need for Tier 1 indicators, which they already find in existing climate portals, the focus for the visualisation tool in CLIPC will be on Tier 2 and 3 indicators for impact researchers, intermediary/boundary organisations and societal end users.
The deliverable presents several visualisation methods for different user categories, ranging from bar graphs, line graphs to maps and compares three European examples of portals on their visualisation possibilities. It further presents a prototype visualisation tool based on the Dutch climate adaptation atlas which allows users to easily compare indicators, climate scenarios, time periods and climate impact.
Perspectives
The proposed visualisation tools will be developed in the coming months into a demonstration mock-up version that can be used for the user consolidation process. In this process users will be consulted on their preferences for the visualisation tools. This consultation will be completed in Month 24, after which the preferred options will be incorporated into the CLIPC portal. Reporting on the outcomes of this evaluation will be combined with the User Manual (which will contain a full description of the final system) in deliverable 4.3 (due month 34), but an interim activity report will be available at month 24.
D4.3 Visualisation manual
Visualization of climate indicators is one of the essential components in the CLIPC portal. This visualization needs to be standardized and high quality, in order to meet the user requirements.
For the CLIPC project the OGC WMS, implemented in ADAGUC [3], is used for all map visualization, time-series graphs and histograms.
ADAGUC (Atmospheric Data Access for the Geospatial User Community) is an Open Source geographical information system to visualize netCDF, HDF5 and GeoJSON over the web. ADAGUC is used because of its high performance visualization of remote OPeNDAP URLs, enabling fast visualization on large datasets.
For this, data needs to be standardized to enable automated visualization, styling and geographical projections. NetCDF is the required file format. These files need to comply with the Climate and Forecast conventions (NetCDF-CF). As many datasets from the CLIPC community are large datasets and available in NetCDF-CF, ADAGUC is an excellent choice for implementation. The software consists of a server side C++ application and a client side JavaScript application. Web clients like GoogleMaps, OpenLayers and Leaflet are supported and can directly use the exposed web-services.
Features of ADAGUC are: fully compliant OGC WMS and WCS, integrated data converters and post processors to support various data conventions, aggregation support.
Features developed in CLIPC context are GeoJSON polygon/vector visualization for ranking, tiling functionality for high resolution datasets, ensemble visualization in the CLIPC portal, histogram visualization in the CLIPC portal and the NetCDF Web Coverage Service (a key internal component).
ADAGUC is an Open Source package and can be easily installed. A fully pre-configured Virtual Machine is available and also many online tutorials are available to support developers. As such it has a growing user community, using ADAGUC in both research and operational environments.
D4.4 Integrated toolbox report
The CLIPC architecture has been build using Open Standards to provide well defined interfaces between data, service back-end and the end user portal. Data is provided in standardized NetCDF-CF format. This enables easy integration into the back-end services. The back-end services are provided to a front-end portal, enabling the CLIPC toolkit functions: Compare, Combine, Calculate indices and MyCLIPC.
The Compare functionality is provided by the ADAGUC WMS service, which is capable to automatically generate a WMS service on NetCDF-CF data.
The Combine functionality is a co-development with WP8. In the combine function two maps can be normalized and combined, using a combine function. At this moment 3 different normalization functions (none, min/max, Z-score) and 8 combine functions (Add, Subtract, Multiply, Divide, Multiply, Less, Equal, Greater) are provided. Besides the result, also the provenance meta-data is stored in the resulting NetCDF-CF file. The combine function uses the WCS and WPS standards for implementation.
Calculate indices is provided by using indices calculations functions from ICCLIM, using pyWPS as implementation for the WPS standard. For processing services a caching system was developed and tested.
MyCLIPC enables users to store, combine and calculate results and to check on longer running processes. The user simply logs in using a Google account. This functionality is provided using the StorageAPI of Climate4Impact.
All is secured using Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), OpenID and OAUTH2. The data and backend services are hosted at KNMI in the Climate4Impact portal and in the ESGF network. The CLIPC front-end portal is hosted and operated by MARIS, at a different location.
The use of Climate4Impact services and expanding on this framework enabled CLIPC to have a head start and a proven platform for development. The services can easily be expanded to provide new and improved services. Next steps include expanding the Combine services with compatibility guidance for the creation of sensible combinations (or issue a warning). A skeleton WPS has already been made available for this purpose.
D4.5 Link to Climate-ADAPT
In response to the call for better-informed decisions and evidence-based policy-making and action, current efforts are concentrated not only on the production of sufficient, relevant and credible climate data, information and knowledge, but also on the adequate and effective dissemination of these products. In addition to the traditional dissemination channels such as the publication of reports and journal papers, and the participation in project meetings and conferences, which target mainly members of the academic and scientific circles, recently we have observed an increase in the number of web portals and knowledge platforms developed to reach a wider audience.
At a theoretical level the potential as well as the usefulness of such web-based dissemination channels is well acknowledged and valid. Yet, the continuous and rapid increase in their number and the fact that most of them have been and continue being developed ‘in isolation’, without taking into consideration other existing portals and platforms, or their products and services, cast doubts on their real added value and, indeed, the need for them. Additionally, as many of the newly established web portals have been developed in the context of projects with a limited lifespan, their maintenance and updating beyond the end of the project funding period are often uncertain, if not unlikely, putting the sustainability of the portals and platforms themselves, as well as of the developments they host in question.
Establishing links between the well-established portals and platforms and those developed more recently may help overcome the aforementioned challenges up to a certain extent and allow portals to complement each other. This report presents part of the results of the task 4.3 ‘Impact Indicator Toolkit’ of the CLIPC project. Work Package (WP) 4, ‘Visualisation and Integration’, looks at the integration and visualisation of the data and components produced and collected in the context of the CLIPC. Within this WP, task 4.3 investigates among others, the ways through which we can link the European Climate Adaptation Platform (Climate-ADAPT) and the Climate Information Portal for Copernicus (CLIPC portal), namely to identify if and how the CLIPC developments (i.e. concepts and prototypes) can be integrated and operationalised in the Climate-ADAPT platform. The report presents some realistic proposals for this purpose. These refer to the submission of new items to the Climate-ADAPT database (i.e. Research and knowledge projects; Indicators), and the introduction of knowledge tools (i.e. Mapviewer / Time series; Indicators tool) and the update of existing content (i.e. Observation and Scenarios; C3S page; Uncertainty Guidance; Glossary) on the Climate-ADAPT website. Institutional and others links, some of which go beyond the boundaries of Climate-ADAPT, are also discussed.
D5.1 Climate Dataset Inventory
Deliverable 5.1 presents a summary of long term climate datasets identified by the CLIPC project as being of potential relevance for the creation of impact indicators and which can feasibly be provided by the project through the harmonised data access system.
CLIPC will provide access to data through several routes. The architecture is designed to avoid unnecessary data movement and duplication of storage costs. Data is distinguished in four major categories:
1. data which is held by CLIPC partners and will be (re-)published through the harmonised interface,
2. data which is available elsewhere through services which are compatible with the harmonised interface will be available in a transparent manner,
3. data which will be worked on in CLIPC and published by a CLIPC partner,
4. data which will be linked to, but will not be brought into the harmonised portal.
The data collections mentioned in the description of work are reviewed, and additional details on the plans for their incorporation in CLIPC are provided. Details of the harmonised data services will be in the architecture document, but the guiding principle will be provision of flexible access to the data, including sub-setting, visualization and bulk download.
D5.2 Meta-data and controlled vocabularies specification for data, quality control and uncertainties
The aim of this deliverable is to describe in detail the use of meta-data and controlled vocabularies for data, quality control and uncertainty information within CLIPC.
Since it is the aim of the portal to provide harmonised data search across a variety of different types of climate data records (e.g. climate model simulations, re-analyses and observational data) it is important that the discovery meta-data is complete and fully descriptive.
Controlled vocabularies play an important role in ensuring consistency across the different communities involved with CLIPC. Where different vocabularies are required or already exist, mapping relationships between the terms will enrich the data and facilitate the harmonisation of data access.
The wide range of formal and informal conventions in the different communities providing climate data presents users with a bewildering kaleidoscope of formats.
Whilst climate model datasets produced in the Coupled Model Inter-comparison Project, Phase 5 (CMIP5) conform to agreed data reference syntax (DRS) and controlled vocabularies, additional datasets considered and included in the CLIPC platform have required these DRS and vocabularies to be developed, and mapped to existing systems. Much progress has been made with the DRS, controlled vocabularies and mappings for a range CLIPC datasets, and in particular the European Space Agency (ESA) Climate Change Initiative (CCI) data.
The meta-data for uncertainties across datasets is not consistent. A case study of CCI data products is included here, and a potential way forward is proposed. Further progress on improving consistency and creating standard vocabularies for uncertainty will be made at an Uncertainties workshop in Hamburg in February 2016. It would be beneficial to include additional controlled vocabularies on the quality and commentary meta-data, this work will be pursued early in 2016.
Further work is also required on the meta-data, DRS and controlled vocabularies for climate impact indicators, for which a workshop is planned in Toulouse in February 2016 to help resolve outstanding issues.
D5.3 Publication of project datasets
This deliverable describes and demonstrates the publication status of the climate impact indicators published to the CLIPC portal. Within the CLIPC project, climate impact indicators are produced, and are made available to users through the CLIPC portal. A publication status table shows that on the 28th July 2016 55% of indicators have been created. All indicators are due to be available on the CLIPC portal by the end of August 2016.
Using the meta-data standards developed for climate impact indicators within CLIPC, meta-data for the indicators have been created and validated. The indicators are stored at KNMI, are harvested by MARIS and published in the portal. Much of the functionality of the portal has been completed and is demonstrated in this document through screen-shots of example searches in the portal. In addition to the climate impact indicators, associated uncertainty information are made available and are demonstrated in this document. The “compare” and “combine” functionality of the portal’s impact indicator toolkit are also shown through screen-shots.
As a result of the development of the climate impact indicator meta-data standards the bias-corrected climate impact indicator data produced within CLIPC (supported by the Bias-correction Inter-comparison Project) has been accepted by CORDEX and is now available through the WCRP CORDEX website1,2. These data can now be published through the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) for wider dissemination. Additionally, the meta-data standards developed in CLIPC are already being used in other international projects.
Much progress has been made in the publication of climate impact indicator data since the publication of the CLIPC meta-data guidelines. These ensure consistency across multiple institutions producing different types of impact indicators, facilitating the discovery of data on the portal and more widely.
D5.4 Tape Archive Interface
The climate modelling community is preparing for the next major model inter-comparison programme – CMIP6. This activity and associated modelling projects are expected to generate an archive in the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) over the next 5 years of at least 30-50 petabytes. Making this available online to users is costly and trade-off decisions have to be made.
Experience gained with the CMIP5 archive would suggest that a centralised online model may need to be adapted to make better use of the climate data produced and held by the modelling centres; specifically:
A significant proportion of the data held in the archive is rarely or never accessed; though the cost of submission, archiving and management of the data in ESGF is high and the modelling groups responsible for generating these data are also maintaining their own tape/disk archives.
Users outside of the groups involved in model inter-comparison often require data that has been produced as part of the MIP climate simulations but has not been requested to be archived by the CMIP5 project (especially high volume sub-daily data for use in regional simulations).
It is clear that the ESGF will need to adopt a different long term solution for providing data access, with heavily used core datasets held in the ESGF online disk archives, and the less popular datasets held in existing modelling centre disk/tape archives and only moved to ESGF when requested by users or a group within the climate research or climate impacts community. Given the wide scope of the datasets that may be required to support climate impact projects it is important that this approach forms part of a future CLIPC environment.
In task 5.4 of the CLIPC project, work was undertaken to develop two interfaces between ESGF and remote climate archives held on robotic tape archive systems. These two activities looked at different aspects of a future distributed archive extension to ESGF:
Linköping University/National Supercomputer Centre implemented a demonstration system that allows a user to request EURO4M data produced by SMHI and held in the MARS archive in GRIB format. Their SODA (System of Online Data Access) system enables a user to access EURO4M data in the MARS archive through the standard ESGF CoG1 interface. To achieve this, meta-data from the ECMWF MARS archive is transferred to the ESGF Solr database to be used in the data search systems. When a user requests download of data from the EURO4M dataset, it uses the standard wget2 mechanism of ESGF, but is routed through the archive-specific plug-in to the SODA scheduler and download management services.
Preliminary testing of this demonstrator has been completed, and it is the intention that the SODA service will ultimately become part of the ESGF software package.
The UK Met Office demonstration system looked at the issue of managing the distribution of climate datasets between the ESGF archives and the local modelling centre archives. This system has been deployed between the Met Office and the CEDA ESGF node, with the Met Office MASS archive system used as the demonstrator tape archive. The system allows the Met Office and CEDA to agree which datasets are routinely ingested into the ESGF archive and which data is held in the MASS archive. If the Met Office or CEDA receive requests for data held in the MASS archive, it can be made available and uploaded immediately. Care has been taken to consider the typical life-cycle of climate data, in order to deal with problems that are identified with data after it has been published. Functional and performance testing during 2016 has been successful, and it is the intention to use this system to support the management of all Met Office datasets for CMIP6.
Although the two demonstrators take different approaches to the problem of distributed access to climate data held in tape archives, there are common features that could be used to support a unified approach. For example, the interfaces developed for the Met Office demonstrator implement the services that are required for the SODA plugins in the LIU/NSC demonstrator. It would also be possible to configure SODA to respond to data upload requests from the modelling centre as implemented in the Met Office solution.
While the results of this work will be finding immediate application for the CMIP6 project, any future evolution of the CLIPC portal should consider the option of introducing features of both developments, in order to open up access to the wider range of data held in modelling centre tape archives.
D5.5 Interoperability Demonstrator
Deliverable 5.5 consists of two sections. The first one is related to the interoperability between Copernicus data infrastructures; specifically, we have demonstrated that Sentinel meta-data hosted in the STFC CEDA environment can be extracted and used to create a searchable catalogue in the Sentinel Data Access Service (SEDAS) environment run by the UK Satellite Applications Catapult.
This has been achieved by developing two new plug-ins for the SEDAS/archive4EO solution. The first plug-in logs onto the CEDA environment and copies Sentinel manifest files into SEDAS/archive4EO for ingestion. The second plug-in allows manifest files to be ingested by SEDAS/archive4EO. Archive4EO is developed by Deimos Space and has been deployed to a number of live environments where it has ingested and catalogued 10s of millions of records.
If required this proof of concept could be made live fairly easily. However some extra work may be required to ensure that the STFC service listing manifest files can be applied to a date or date range to allow new manifest files to be collected using a clear handshaking protocol.
The second section of the report concerns the activities carried out to extend the set of interfaces provided by the Ophidia Framework and how it has been used to calculate impact indicators in the context of the project. Specifically, to support users for their analytics and scientific operations on large volumes of data, the Ophidia Big Data Analytics Framework has been extended to support an OGC-WPS compliant interface.
With the aim of addressing interoperability aspects (e.g. within ESGF) in terms of data access and exposed services, this interface has been developed on top of the Ophidia server providing a web-based method for remotely submitting the execution of processes to the Ophidia platform and accessing the results. By means of the WPS interface, the Ophidia framework has been used to compute some impact analysis indicator starting from large input datasets (order of tens/hundreds of Gigabytes) like the SWE climatological mean, snow-off, snow-on and Length-of-snow-season, SST mean, anomaly and climatological mean.
The resulting indicators are available on the CLIPC Portal for downloading and further analysis and combine functions.
D6.1 Climate Model Data for Europe
This report documents the datasets published as Deliverable D6.1 “Climate model data for Europe, bias-corrected when necessary, for CCII-T1 calculation. Documented dataset”, where “CCII-T1” stands for “Tier 1 Climate Change Impact Indicators”. The focus is on bias corrected data at three different spatial resolutions:
i) global climate model (GCM) data interpolated to a common 2° × 2° grid,
ii) regional climate model data (RCM) at the Euro-Cordex 0.44° × 0.44° (~ 50 km × 50km) grid, and
iii) RCM data at the Euro-Cordex 0.11° × 0.11° (~ 12 km × 12 km) grid.
Alternative bias correction methods have been used by the groups contributing to this deliverable. The methods are described in detail and sample results are presented. They are substantially dependent on long high-quality daily reference datasets, spanning at least 20 years. For Europe well established datasets are available for temperature (daily mean, minimum and maximum) and precipitation. Hence, the report focusses on these variables. All methods produce a substantial reduction of the bias during the reference period. The bias reduction is one order of magnitude, and typically more successful for temperature than for precipitation fields. As expected, different methods do not result in exactly the same corrected data.
The bias corrected climate model datasets are currently available through the CLIPC webportal and will eventually become available through the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) web portals. The latter host the corresponding archive of the non-bias-corrected (“raw”) climate model data. The datasets published as CLIPC Deliverable D6.1 are the first based on multi-method bias correction of published Euro-Cordex RCM data at two spatial resolutions, and complemented by bias corrected GCM data.
These datasets are publicly available and can be further explored for many and diverse purposes. A straightforward application within CLIPC consists of deriving the Tier 1 Climate Change Impact Indicators (CCII-T1) based on daily precipitation and 2m air temperature provided by the RCMs.
The use of multiple bias correction methods enables a deeper analysis of the robustness and uncertainties associated with bias correction. As a consequence, the bias correction task within CLIPC WP6 provides a catalytic contribution to the Bias Correction Inter-comparison Project (BCIP) across a number of EU funded research projects.
Finally, CLIPC WP6 aims to explore the possibility of using the remotely sensed data as reference datasets to allow bias correction of a larger selection of model output variables where relevant reference datasets currently are lacking.
D6.2 Observation based CCII-T1s
This report documents datasets published as deliverable 6.2 “Observation-based CCII-T1s for the recent past and performance metrics for climate model based CCII-T1s, where “CCII-T1” stands for “Tier 1 Climate Change Impact Indicators”. Three types of data are discussed: CCII-T1s calculated from observational data, CCII-T1s based on climate models, and observational and re-analysis data used for evaluation and/or bias-correction of model-based indicators.
A number of satellite based datasets for climate change indicator indices were acquired and assessed and results presented in this document. There are several promising candidates among, e.g. the ESA CCI programme, ESA GlobSnow and EC CryoLand that were documented and also examined for application for bias correction of climate model data.
In addition to describing produced datasets this document examines the challenges inherent in comparing model-based data to observational/re-analysis data and using these datasets for bias-correcting model based data. Both re-analysis- and satellite-based datasets have their own errors (due to modelling-, sensor characteristics and limitations) in turning the raw observations to variables that can be compared with those provided by climate models. While satellite-based observations have the advantage of providing large, usually global spatial coverage and providing data from remote locations where observations would otherwise be sparse or non-existent, they have their own set of challenges that need to be taken into account, such as data caps due cloud coverage and low light conditions or those caused by given instrument’s chosen orbit. This causes another source of uncertainty that needs to be taken into account when bias-correcting model-based data.
Additionally, the length of time-series is often a problem, as bias-correction needs to have several tens of years’ worth of data in order to take into account the natural variability; whereas suitable satellite time series are typically limited in time coverage to at most a few decades. The work carried out is a fair start for a field that has not been thoroughly investigated so far. Several problems and issues in the data and approaches suitable for the work were identified and early progress shows that there is potential to utilize the unique satellite-based datasets for both bias correction of climate model data and an independent “ground truth” reference data.
All the CCII-T1s will be available through the CLIPC portal. The climate model data will be available through the CLIPC portal and the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) web portal. Observational data is available through either ESGF or individual institutions responsible for producing said data.
D6.3 Future CCII-T1 scenarios for Europe
This report documents the work on producing climate data that is focussing more on the needs of the impacts communities. The work has progressed along two main lines. Firstly, the development of methods and tools for processing the basic meteorological variables, like precipitation and temperature, to produce various impact-oriented measures or Tier-1 Climate Change Impact Indicators (CCII’s). Tier-1 indicators are those that can be calculated from climate data only (i.e. commonly available data about the physical climate system). In the second line of work we have developed and applied a procedure for finding reduced representative ensembles.
The work on CCII-T1 has produced three main results: i) work towards a community standard (extending outside CLIPC) for meta-data description of Tier-1 indicators. This work has been done in close collaboration with WP5, where the WP6 part concerns aspects that are closely related to the processing of the data. ii) a substantially extended and an updated processing tool, that also handles the stable components of the draft meta-data standard. iii) production of a considerable ensemble of Tier-1 indicators, based on unadjusted as well as bias-adjusted regional projections and representing both RCP4.5 and RCP8.5. This ensemble is now available through the CLIPC portal.
At an early stage in the work on reduced ensembles it became clear, not least from interaction with stakeholders, that the requirements were so diverse so that it was not possible to develop one ensemble that would fit all purposes. Instead, we developed a tool that would be flexible enough to allow production of reduced ensembles tailored to the specific needs and applications. The procedure was tested in a range of different case studies. Assessment of the ensemble spread (aka ‘uncertainty’) were partly hampered by the fact that the ensembles of regional projections were rather small (about 10 members) and further reduced to 2-5 members only. We have applied the climate signal map approach to assessing the robustness of the full input ensemble, but this method is not applicable to smaller ensemble sizes. An objective method for assessing the robustness of such small ensemble sizes is presently not available.
This result highlights the fundamental guideline to avoid as far as possible to reduce the available ensemble size. While reducing the ensemble likely will reduce the calculated spread of the ensemble, it will not reduce the underlying uncertainty as such, only make it less visible and thus reduce the information regarding robustness of the results. Sometimes however the circumstances dictate that it is impossible to make use of the full ensemble, in which case the ensemble reduction method may provide a way forward.
D7.1 A review of climate impact indicators
Objectives:
This deliverable has five main objectives:
1 - Elaboration of criteria for examining climate impact indicators.
2 - Documentation of an expert workshop involving relevant partners to discuss the criteria.
3 - Creation of a catalog of potential impact indicators to be made available via CLIPC.
4 - Assessment of strengths and weaknesses of climate impact indicators.
5 - Identify mismatches between user needs and the indicators documented.
Results:
In this deliverable, a total of 81 climate change and impact indicators are examined using a consistent set of reference criteria. These include aspects such as the methodological description of indicators, the data requirements and availability for indicator calculation, treatment of uncertainty, fitness for purpose of indicator time series and seven other relevant criteria. An analysis of previous work conducted by initiatives providing collections of climate indicators, and follow-up discussions in an expert meeting workshop, ensures that the criteria selected are in line with the core purposes of WP7.
The indicators were grouped in three tiers, with Tier-1 focusing on the climate system, Tier-2 indicators the impacts of climate change in bio-physical systems and Tier-3 indicators on the socio-economic systems affected by climate change. An analysis of the scientific and technical strengths and weaknesses of indicators was feasible but only at an aggregate level. As a particular strength of indicators gathered it can be pointed out that a large proportion of the input data for the indicators is in the public domain. This is mostly visible for Tier-1 and Tier-2 indicators. For half of the Tier-3 indicators documented some data restrictions have been documented. It should also be noted that the total number of Tier-3 indicators is relatively small in comparison with the other Tiers.
Indicator uncertainty is a key issue. In the indicator documentation, some information on uncertainties was available for approximately 2/3 of the indicators. The detail of description varies but in general information of uncertainty introduced by the indicator method and that related to the input data is documented. This particular aspect is to be further strengthened in the running of WP7 via more engagement on harmonizing the uncertainty descriptions. An apparent weakness of the indicators documented is the lack of regular updating. This is particularly the case when the indicators have been developed and presented as the output of specific research projects and not maintained by organizations responsible for monitoring or statistical data.
An evaluation of strengths and weaknesses on indicators-by-indicator basis has been proposed and conducted for particular cases. Its completion will need to expand beyond the time frame of this deliverable as an overarching activity of WP7 until the production of the CLIPC portal.
In an attempt to explore strengths and weaknesses of indicators further, we used preliminary results of the user consultation of WP2 in an attempt to evaluate indicators for specific purposes (as stated by users). Although the preliminary user consultation made it possible to identify general uses of indicators (e.g. production of risk and vulnerability assessments), details on particular applications of indicator by users are missing. Because only general uses are known, the evaluation of indicators from a user’s perspective suffers from our incomplete knowledge on how much weight a particular user might attribute to particular strengths and weaknesses. Despite these limitations, the deliverable gathered an extensive set of information on impact and climate change indicators and developed the approach for analyzing strengths and weaknesses of indicators. The documentation sets the standards of information in the meta-data to be included for the impact indicators in the CLIPC portal.
The sample of indicators gathered at the time of writing have been observed to match the user needs for using indicators as input for climate research and for the purposes of awareness raising. The uses of supporting the elaboration of adaptation strategies and vulnerability studies can already be supported by the indicators gathered, although in these cases it is still preliminary to make definitive judgements in the light of draw backs previously highlighted. Further interaction with users and subsequent updates of indicator documentation will help to clarify this.
Finally, in order to pave the way for data integration within WP7, two tentative developments of new impact indicators are envisioned, namely, an indicator of heat-stress of population and moth phenology index. A brief description of the types of data used for the calculation and the schematic steps for indicator calculation are presented.
Perspectives:
The deliverable has set the foundation for much of the work ahead in WP7 but also in WP8. An overall scheme for indicator documentation was put in place and a first large bulk of indicator documented. The next steps are the harmonization of some criteria in order to allow for a full use of the database in discerning indicator strengths and weakness on a more detailed level. This is a long term activity within WP7.
As long term perspectives, the work of WP7 will be focused on the completion and expansion of the review of indicators made in this deliverable. The completion will benefit from a longer time frame for filling missing relevant criteria information via more interactions with the partners. In addition, more detailed insights from ongoing user consultation will hopefully allow for a better matching of the indicator list collected to the user needs. The expansion of the indicator list will particularly focus on expanding the Tier2 and 3 indicators.
D7.2 The use of impact functions to develop Tier 2 and 3 indicators in CLIPC
Objectives:
The objective of this deliverable is twofold. First, the deliverable reviews the methodological challenges of generating impact functions. An impact function is described as a quantitative relationship between a climate or climate related stimulus (e.g. temperature or flood depth), and an ecological or socio-economic variable (e.g. economic loss or species distribution). The review identifies two approaches for establishing impact functions that can be used in CLIPC for the development of additional impact indicators. The first approach is based on establishing a statistical relationship between a climate variable, or Tier 1 indicator, and a measure of socio-economical or ecological impact for a particular large region, e.g. Europe-wide. Because socio-economic and ecological data is not always available across Europe at a temporal or spatial resolution required for a statistical assessment, a second approach was established. The latter uses impact functions that have been derived from statistics for a particular location and scale these up, either using additional variables or generalized assumptions, so that the function can be used at much larger spatial scales than that for which it was originally developed. In order to demonstrate potential applications, three impact indicators for CLIPC are elaborated these are: Moth Phenology Indicator, Threshold Mortality Temperatures, and Potential Economic Damages from Coastal Flooding.
Although work on the new indicators is still preliminary, it serves to highlight the benefits, and also challenges, of using impact functions to generate impact indicators. Therefore, the benefits, uncertainties, saliency, legitimacy, and credibility of each additional indicator are also described. The potential inclusion of each indicator in the CLIPC portal is discussed.
Results:
The indicators developed using impact functions are: Moth Phenology Indicator, Threshold Mortality Temperatures, and Potential Economic Damages from Coastal Flooding. These new indicators illustrate the approach and have a number of useful characteristics for potential users of the CLIPC portal.
The Moth Phenology Indicator illustrates that it is possible to project the timing of peak flight periods of moths using temperature observations and satellite data. The use of remotely-sensed variables (snow melt, greening) in the impact function makes it possible to determine the phenology of species over large geographic areas. Potentially practical applications include the management of pest insect populations in a changing climate.
The Threshold Mortality Temperatures indicator allows better contextualizing of heat data than purely temperature based indicators such as number of hot days (Tier 1 indicator). This shows that the salience and relevance of the temperature information can be increased through impact functions. Thus, the actual impacts on the population of a change in, for example, the number of hot days, will depend on the minimum human mortality temperatures. The indicator can therefore be interpreted as the current level of tolerance to heat by the population. Another asset of the indicator is that it provides a first order approximation of threshold temperatures in locations where so far no specific heat-mortality study has been conducted.
The Potential Economic Damages from Coastal Flooding indicator is determined via a systematic transformation of location-specific surge heights into an estimate of economic damages associated with different land-uses. The impact function estimates economic damages derived for specific areas can be generalised and compared with existing observations of economic losses from insurance or disaster data covering wider areas. In this manner, it opens the way for indicator validation. Using the empirical damage functions associated with different types of land-use and time horizons allows the support of discussions on urban adaptation to coastal flooding by highlighting different levels of adaptation, including actions that modify the function itself through preventive measures at the land-use scale that change the response between flood depth and economic damage.
Perspectives:
The approach described in this report suggests that the development and use of impact functions is a feasible and attractive way of increasing the relevance and salience of purely physical indicators of climate change (i.e. Tier 1 indicators). Impact functions can also be used to scale up detailed information from Tier 2 or Tier 3 indicators developed for specific locations to cover wider areas. Such indicators have been developed and published in the scientific literature by various authors, but the data are generally not publicly available and can therefore not easily be included in CLIPC.
Caution is warranted in interpreting indicators based on impact functions as there are significant uncertainties related to the data, the choice and estimation of the impact function and the attribution of impacts to climate change. But because of the attractiveness of enabling users to explore new impact indicators in a quick way on their own, it is recommended to further explore opportunities for combining Tier 1 indicators with other information to produce Tier 2 and 3 indicators based on impact functions. However, despite some promising work the challenges in using impact function for constructing higher Tier indicators should not be underestimated. This report provides ideas for how indicators can be generated using impact functions, but the specific methods will depend strongly on the nature of the impact to be evaluated and on the availability of data.
D7.3 Toolkit indicator module
Objectives
The objectives of this deliverable are to describe our work-flow from the production of a climate impact indicator to its publication in the CLIPC portal and use by the toolkit. In particular 1) coordinating and providing data to the CLIPC toolkit following the meta-data-standards established in WP5, and 2) providing the expert-based confidence assessment for a sub-set of indicators following the template provided by WP8.
Results
The provision of impact indicators with a harmonized meta-data underpins the adequate functioning of CLIPC indicator toolkit and functions within. In total the 71 climate impact indicators (including 3 Tiers and also socio-economic sensitivity data) are made available for the CLIPC portal and toolkit and compliant with the meta-data standards established in WP5 and WP6 (see distribution in Figure 1). Also, the expert-based information about uncertainty and confidence is available for a subset of the indicators. This uncertainty assessment is created after the specifications described in WP8. Specifications include the enumeration of predefined sources of uncertainty (e.g. external uncertainty or external natural forcing), their nature (e.g. unpredictability, stochasticity), and a final expert statement on the overall degree of confidence in the dataset. These assessments are now integral part of the CLIPC portal and can be consulted in the CLIPC toolkit. The documentation database to trace the progress of indicators across the established workflow was established and is available on line: https://goo.gl/8X0xT9
Perspectives
It is expected that tracking the progress of indicators from production to portal publication might help forthcoming projects on the optimization of their own workflow. Moreover, the challenges and barriers described when attempting to follow the CLIPC workflow warn future similar initiatives of potential pitfalls to consider and suggest potential solutions.
D7.4 Guidance on production and use of indicators
Objectives:
The objectives of this deliverable can be summarized as follows:
To develop stylized guidance on the use and production of indicators.
To tailor the guidance according the needs of CLIPC user groups climate scientists, impacts researchers and intermediary organizations.
To enumerate the CLIPC functionalities and data required in order to operate the stylized guidance.
To practically illustrate the guidance steps in the CLIPC portal.
To formulate suggestions for future work concerning provision of guidance to end-users.
Results:
Building on the specific requirements of potential users, this deliverable elaborates structured guidance on 4 simulated tasks regarding the use and production of climate impact indicators in the CLIPC portal. These tasks use concrete “data usage purposes” suggested by potential end-users in D2.2 User requirements, Part 2. The tasks have been structured according to the potential user-groups of CLIPC, and can be summarized as follows:
Give advice on data and climate impact indicators to others (Intermediary organizations, Climate Scientists and Impacts researchers)
Create awareness (Intermediary organizations)
Perform risk and vulnerability assessments (Impact researchers)
Input in research on climate change (Impact researchers)
In addition, a section elaborates how to derive relevant information from the file name of CLIPC datasets, guidance requested by the users during the consultations.
Perspectives:
With the need for guidance taking a very prominent role during the elaboration of the CLIPC portal and the user consultations, it is expected that a similar requirement from the side of end-users will emerge in forthcoming work promoting the use of climate information portals to wider audiences. Accordingly, the examples of guidance on the use and elaboration of impact indicators by user group can facilitate future similar work.
D8.1 Impact models and aggregation
Deliverable D8.1 represents an intersection point between indicator documentation (WP7) and indicator exploration (WP8). Its aim was to analyze the indicators documented in WP7 and determine to which degree they are compatible with one another in order to inform the development of tools for indicator exploration and aggregation (see MS34).
Deliverable D8.1 therefore needed to develop and apply a methodology which operationalizes the degree of compatibility between indicators. For this each of the 89 climate impact indicators compiled within the framework of D7.1 had to be analyzed in relation to all other indicators.
Six determinants of indicator compatibility were identified. For each determinant the relevant issues were discussed and a suitable compatibility classification scheme was developed. For each determinant all climate impact indicators currently included in the indicator database of D7.1 were related to each other and assessed in regard to their degree of compatibility.
The majority of fully documented pairs of indicators from D7.1 were found to be compatible in regard to time periods, spatial extents, treatment of adaptive capacity, underlying scenarios, data types and conceptual frameworks when considered separately. Of course mere compatibility between particular indicators does not necessarily mean that it makes sense to compare or combine them. Therefore, the results of D8.1 provided only a first basis for the development of tools in Tasks 8.2 and 8.3 and for developing more in-depth user guidance on how to meaningfully relate indicators to each other.
D8.2 Scenario based indicator exploration
This deliverable documents data and tools developed by the CLIPC project for exploring scenario-based indicators.
The first part of the report gave an overview of the various climatic, demographic, socio-economic and land-use scenario data that were developed and/or post-processed for the CLIPC portal. The underlying scenarios and methodologies are explained, including how the data were spatially disaggregated to comparable resolutions.
The second part introduced various web-based tools of the CLIPC portal that allow users to explore scenario-based data. The report described in detail a) different ways of using the interactive CLIPC map viewer for scenario indicator exploration, b) a tailor-made scenario viewer that allows easy visual exploration of different time periods and scenarios of an indicator, c) more refined exploration of one indicator or comparisons between different indicators by using the CLIPC comparison tool, and finally d) calculation of residuals and corresponding residual maps for more accurate exploration of differences e.g. between time periods.
D8.3 Comparison, ranking and aggregation of impact indicators
This deliverable documents and explains the comparison, combination, aggregation and ranking tools of the CLIPC portal in detail. The tools differ in complexity and flexibility and thus allow users of different experience and skill levels to interrelate and compare data available in the CLIPC portal. All tools are implemented as web-based, dynamic tools that produce results ‘on the fly’ in response to users’ interaction.
In particular the deliverable explains how to use the CLIPC toolkit to (a) conduct visual and statistical comparisons of indicators, (b) conduct metadata comparisons, (c) calculate and visualise temporal changes, (d) calculate and visualise changes between different RCPs, (e) combine two climatic indicators in order to create and visualise a new composite indicator, (f) combine climate change exposure and sensitivity indicators in order to create and visualise a new tier 3 climate change impact indicator (g) conduct a quick compatibility check of the selected input indicators, (h) aggregate and visualise newly created indicators at district/county level and country level, (i) display and sort individual results of the above tools and (j) download statistical results, maps and protocols for each newly created indicator.
For users that otherwise do not have access to a large variety of state-of-the art climate change related data or do not have the necessary infrastructure or skills for more sophisticated analysis, the CLIP-C portal documented in this deliverable provides a carefully curated set of data and easy to use tools for a first interactive exploration and analysis of climate change impacts in Europe.
The report explains the functionalities and user guidance, while Milestone 38 chronicles the ‘evolution’ of each tool and Deliverable 3.3 documents the tools’ interfaces in detail. How these tools can be used in representative use cases is documented in Milestone 40.
D8.4 Uncertainty assessment of climate impact indicators
Aim and Objective
This deliverables summarises how the CLIPC project dealt and engaged with the topic ‘uncertainty1’ and how it is presented and communicated in the final version of the CLIPC portal. This deliverable is a constituent part of Work Package 8 (WP8) summarising the results of task 8.4 ‘Development of tools specifying uncertainties of climate impact
indicators’. The specific objectives of task 8.4 include:
a) Development of a methodology and tools to specify the uncertainty of climate change impact indicators developed in WP7 and WP8 with a tailor-made analysis to identify and communicate uncertainties of impact indicators
b) Statistical estimation of the robustness of tier 1 climate impact indicators based on different climate model scenarios covered in WP6
The development steps and first implementations of the methodology are described in detail in three previous milestones (MS34, MS37 & MS 39). Prime concept ideas of presenting uncertainty with confidence are described in MS34. The methodology of providing confidence information for the climate impact indicators is based on a questionnaire and user consultations as described in MS37. The subsequent MS39 presents the work-flow of the implementation of the expert-based confidence information into the CLIPC portal.
The strategy how the CLIPC project engaged with uncertainties and how the management of confidence information is presented in the final version of the CLIPC portal is the main object of this deliverable 8.4.
Potential Impact:
Within C3S: through tenders
CLIPC partners are contributing to C3S through a number of sub-contracts.
Within C3S: through adoption
CLIPC has engaged with C3S throughout the project, and in the final months held a series of meetings to discuss how C3S could exploit project foreground. C3S has expressed interest in 3 main areas:
User engagement;
C3S are interested in the process of continuous engagement developed in CLIPC. Discussions with ALTERRA are ongoing.
Standards framework;
The standards framework used by CLIPC creates a rich meta-data structure which is embedded in data files, enabling robust automated processing. STFC is in discussion with C3S.
Data provenance workflow
The processing service developed in CLIPC embeds provenance information in files which enables processes to be re-run automatically. KNMI is in discussion with C3S.
List of Websites:
www.clipc.eu