Supporting and standardising climate services

This topic is intended to improve the delivery of quality control and standards (including open and licensed) for climate services and to guarantee suitability, quality, and performance of digital solutions to manage climate risks and enhance adaptive capacities.

The scope of activities under this topic should cover the following aspects:

• Uncertainty analysis and quality control with supportive case studies at various levels (national to European and global), and delivery domains (public and private).
• Preparation of metadata guidelines to document in a comparative and transparent manner climate service data sources and processing methodologies, as well as decision-making based on these services, and support FAIR[[FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable).]] data management practices.
• Development of good practices, guidance, and standardization of climate information and verification methods for long-term forecast products.
• Definition of verification and certification methods to enhance quality and usability of climate services, including methods for the evaluation of their effectiveness.
• Coordination and promotion of European climate service activities, encouraging open exchange of knowledge, expertise and data and providing a science-user communication platform and improving synergies between regional, national, European and international activities.
• Development of appropriate business models and knowledge brokerage activities to support scale-up and replication of climate services.

Actions should develop interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary activities. Regular engagement with stakeholders should be foreseen to consider applications in case studies, and to test, benefit and allow replication and upscaling of the results.

These standards and schemes will also require supportive governance and other measures, such as training and capacity building, to promote and sustain their use and continued development. This includes the development of common terminology between user, provider, and purveyor communities.

Synergies should be explored with relevant activities under other Clusters, in particular clusters 3 and 4 and standardization efforts internationally and in Europe (e.g. the Climate Services partnership, the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), Digital Europe Programme and the Copernicus Programme, amongst others). The action should build on the achievements of the H2020 ClimatEurope project and the ERA4CS.

This topic requires the effective contribution of SSH disciplines and the involvement of SSH experts, institutions as well as the inclusion of relevant SSH and gender expertise, in order to produce meaningful and significant effects enhancing the societal impact of the related research activities.