Periodic Reporting for period 1 - CityCLIM (NEXT GENERATION CITY CLIMATE SERVICES USING ADVANCED WEATHER MODELS AND EMERGING DATA SOURCES)
Reporting period: 2021-10-01 to 2023-03-31
The strategic objective of CityCLIM is to significantly contribute to delivering the next-generation of City Climate Services based on advanced weather forecast models enhanced with data both from existing, but insufficiently used, sources and emerging data sources, such as satellite data (e.g. Copernicus da-ta) or data generated by Citizens Science approaches for Urban Climate Monitoring etc. For City Climate Services, data products of interest related to land surface properties, atmospheric properties (e.g. aerosol optical thickness), geometry etc. For all of those, information of interest concerns e.g. Copernicus data products and services that are already existing (e.g. based on Sentinel-3/OLCI, PROBA-V, SPOT, Sentinel-1, MetopASCAT data), will exist in the near future (based on already flying satellites such as Sentinel-2), or will exist in the mid-term (based on satellites currently under development) and long-term (based on satellites soon starting concept phase) future. The project will establish:
(i) an open platform allowing for efficient building of services based on access to diverse data;
(ii) enhanced weather models based on data from diverse existing and emerging sources;
(iii) a set of City Climate Services customizable to specific needs of users in cities; and
(iv) a generic Framework for building next generation of Urban Climate Services.
CityCLIM will be driven by 4 Pilots addressing diverse climate regions in Europe (Luxembourg, Thessaloniki, Valencia, Karlsruhe) which will define requirements upon the tools to be developed, support specification and testing of the services and serve as demonstrators of the selected approaches and the developed technologies. The consortium will elaborate business plan to assure sustainability of the platform and services.
(i) an open platform allowing for efficient building of services based on access to diverse data;
(ii) enhanced weather models based on data from diverse existing and emerging sources;
(iii) a set of City Climate Services customizable to specific needs of users in cities; and
(iv) a generic Framework for building next generation of Urban Climate Services.
CityCLIM will be driven by 4 Pilots addressing diverse climate regions in Europe (Luxembourg, Thessaloniki, Valencia, Karlsruhe) which will define requirements upon the tools to be developed, support specification and testing of the services and serve as demonstrators of the selected approaches and the developed technologies. The consortium will elaborate business plan to assure sustainability of the platform and services.
In the first 18 months of the project, the following work in particular was carried out to achieve the main technical objectives:
• A detailed update of the analysis of the gaps in the state of the art.
• Detailed analysis of the as-is situation for the pilot cases, to address the general business needs and technological challenges that should be solved by the CityCLIM solution. In addition, a first version of the to-be scenarios in the form of envisaged baseline services have been defined, describing advanced city climate services.
• Elaboration of Laboratory Prototypes for a proof of concept of critical components and the engineering environment including an early validation by the industrial partners.
• Scheduling of an implementation plan for the software components of each CityCLIM Generic City Climate Platform (GCCP, see also Figure 1) and Climate Services. This initial implementation plan illustrates a first definition of system and service functionalities to be specified/developed for the implementation of the Early Prototype, enabling to test critical system functionalities and paths.
• Elaboration of a Framework concept that shall serve the different stakeholders of the CityCLIM value chain as basic guidelines for participating in the overall CityCLIM workflow.
• Detailed specification and development of Early Prototypes of the CityCLIM GCCP from the innovation concept.
• Specification and implementation of the first prototypes of the pilot climate services using the GCCP framework solutions.
• Elaboration of the project’s dissemination strategy and development of a set of materials (web-site, flyer etc.) to support dissemination actions.
• Dissemination of the project ideas and results.
• Elaboration of an initial exploitation plan, including the definition of exploitable results and identification of possible exploitation strategies.
• A detailed update of the analysis of the gaps in the state of the art.
• Detailed analysis of the as-is situation for the pilot cases, to address the general business needs and technological challenges that should be solved by the CityCLIM solution. In addition, a first version of the to-be scenarios in the form of envisaged baseline services have been defined, describing advanced city climate services.
• Elaboration of Laboratory Prototypes for a proof of concept of critical components and the engineering environment including an early validation by the industrial partners.
• Scheduling of an implementation plan for the software components of each CityCLIM Generic City Climate Platform (GCCP, see also Figure 1) and Climate Services. This initial implementation plan illustrates a first definition of system and service functionalities to be specified/developed for the implementation of the Early Prototype, enabling to test critical system functionalities and paths.
• Elaboration of a Framework concept that shall serve the different stakeholders of the CityCLIM value chain as basic guidelines for participating in the overall CityCLIM workflow.
• Detailed specification and development of Early Prototypes of the CityCLIM GCCP from the innovation concept.
• Specification and implementation of the first prototypes of the pilot climate services using the GCCP framework solutions.
• Elaboration of the project’s dissemination strategy and development of a set of materials (web-site, flyer etc.) to support dissemination actions.
• Dissemination of the project ideas and results.
• Elaboration of an initial exploitation plan, including the definition of exploitable results and identification of possible exploitation strategies.
CityCLIM directly contributes to the impacts set in the work programme under the challenge LC-GD-9-2-2020: Developing end-user products and services for all stakeholders and citizens supporting climate adaptation, as it intends to deliver both the sets of next-generation of climate services and set of tools to build such services, addressing the downstream part of the value chain, providing actionable information to non-specialists for adapting to extreme climate events and new climatic conditions through tools, platforms (e.g. GEOSS & Copernicus) and/or mobile applications.
In order to fulfil the key strategic objective of the project, i.e. to significantly contribute to delivering the next-generation of City Climate Services based on advanced weather forecast models enhanced with data both from existing, but insufficiently used, sources and emerging data sources, such as satellite data (e.g. Copernicus data) or data generated by Citizens Science approaches for Urban Climate Monitoring etc., the project intends to provide several key building blocks needed for effective development and delivery of such services. The key tool to be provided includes the open, Generic City Climate Platform allowing for time and cost effective use of data from diverse sources/platforms, with main focus upon the satellite data, to build diverse City Climate Services. The second building block is the Advanced Urban Weather Model which will offer high-resolution (100 m x 100 m) weather observation and forecast needed to provide actionable knowledge on climate change to end users in cities. The important building block, integrated in the open CityCLIM platform, will be processing and customisation of data from diverse sources, and especially satellite data to allow for their effective use in diverse services. One of the building blocks will be the generation of data by Citizens Science approaches for Urban Climate Monitoring. The building blocks will be integrated in the CityCLIM platform and made available to service providers to build diverse City Climate Services.
In order to fulfil the key strategic objective of the project, i.e. to significantly contribute to delivering the next-generation of City Climate Services based on advanced weather forecast models enhanced with data both from existing, but insufficiently used, sources and emerging data sources, such as satellite data (e.g. Copernicus data) or data generated by Citizens Science approaches for Urban Climate Monitoring etc., the project intends to provide several key building blocks needed for effective development and delivery of such services. The key tool to be provided includes the open, Generic City Climate Platform allowing for time and cost effective use of data from diverse sources/platforms, with main focus upon the satellite data, to build diverse City Climate Services. The second building block is the Advanced Urban Weather Model which will offer high-resolution (100 m x 100 m) weather observation and forecast needed to provide actionable knowledge on climate change to end users in cities. The important building block, integrated in the open CityCLIM platform, will be processing and customisation of data from diverse sources, and especially satellite data to allow for their effective use in diverse services. One of the building blocks will be the generation of data by Citizens Science approaches for Urban Climate Monitoring. The building blocks will be integrated in the CityCLIM platform and made available to service providers to build diverse City Climate Services.