Project description
The climate information that future city planners need
What is the best way to assess the impacts of climate change on European cities? With the support of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the CIRCE project will identify innovative impact indicators that are relevant for local decision-makers and can be calculated from modelled and available city data. The project will also clarify the best current regional climate modelling configurations for urban impact studies. By defining multisectoral indicators based on local climate risks (with a focus on heat waves and extreme precipitation) and urban issues related to various European cities, CIRCE will identify city-oriented impacts. Their future evolution will be analysed by regional climate change projections up to the convection-resolving scale to inform climate-resilient urban planning of the future.
Objective
Extreme weather events are already affecting urban areas with sometimes severe impacts on people, infrastructure and socio-economic activities. Faced with these effects, which are expected to increase due to climate change, decision-makers need sound climate information on local urban issues in order to better plan the cities of tomorrow.
Today, climate change impacts on urban areas are assessed by separate scientific communities, with some methodological limitations for each approach: Regional Climate Models (RCM) provide climate change information at the regional scale, but with a coarse horizontal resolution for cities and without specific surface parameterisation for urban processes; most high-resolution impact studies focusing on urban issues (energy, thermal comfort) do not take into account urban-regional climate interactions and are city and indicator dependent.
The CIRCE project aims to develop a more robust and generic methodology for assessing the impacts of climate change on European cities by (1) identifying innovative impact indicators that are relevant for local decision-makers and can be calculated from modelled and available city data and (2) clarifying the best current regional climate modelling configurations for urban impact studies. To this end, the new generation of high-resolution Convective-Permitting Models (CPM) will be used for the first time in a multi-city ensemble approach. Multi-sectoral indicators will be defined based on local climate risks (with a focus on heat waves and extreme precipitation) and urban issues related to various European cities. The ability of climate models to simulate specific extreme climate events and their impacts on cities will be assessed. Then, their future evolution will be analysed by combining the largest set of RCMs and CPMs currently available. The final objective will be to co-develop an urban climate service demonstrator based on these results and to feed into the CORDEX Flagship Pilot Study URB-RCC.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-AG-UN - HORIZON Unit GrantCoordinator
21502 Geesthacht
Germany