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CORDIS

Towards an Integrated Capability to Explain and Predict Regional Climate Changes

Project description

Forecasting the future of extreme weather

In recent years, the frequency and intensity of heatwaves, floods, and other extreme events have increased faster than climate models had anticipated. That gap between expectation and reality is now a pressing problem for governments across Europe and beyond. It makes future planning difficult. In this context, the EU-funded EXPECT project aims to improve regional climate predictions and explain why extremes are intensifying. Drawing on new high-resolution simulations, satellite observations, and machine-learning techniques, the project analyses how atmospheric circulation and land-atmosphere dynamics drive year-to-year and decade-scale shifts. EXPECT is also building tools to handle the massive climate datasets scattered across institutions, training researchers to use them. The goal is to deliver trustworthy forecasts to guide Europe’s adaptation strategies.

Objective

The climate system is changing rapidly and some regions have seen increases in extremes beyond what is expected from climate model simulations. To support targeted climate adaptation strategies, EXPECT will enable trustworthy assessments and predictions of regional climate change including extremes by developing a prototype operational capability for integrated attribution and prediction of climate. This ambitious goal is closely aligned with the WCRP Lighthouse Activity on Explaining and Predicting Earth System Change.

EXPECT will identify and quantify the mechanisms by which physical processes govern regional climatic changes, including extremes, on inter-annual to multi-decadal time scales. It will do so by exploiting newly available climate simulations and Earth Observations (EOs), and by combining machine learning (ML) with physical methods. The research will target fundamental knowledge gaps related to atmospheric circulation and land-atmosphere interactions, which represent major limitations in current climate predictions and projections, and in particular in understanding changes in European summer extremes.

To underpin the research, and benefitting the wider research community, EXPECT will develop tools to efficiently analyse a variety of large data sets in combination that are hosted in different repositories across institutions. This will facilitate the exploitation of recent investments into high-resolution climate models and EO data. EXPECT will further build data science capacity for the scientifically robust, efficient and reproducible analysis of the massive data assets, including novel ML approaches, and provide training for the climate science community and the next generation of researchers in particular.

EXPECT will thus deliver significant scientific and technological advances for society and the climate science community that will last well beyond the project, in support of WCRP’s strategic objectives.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

Keywords

Programme(s)

Topic(s)

Funding Scheme

HORIZON-RIA - HORIZON Research and Innovation Actions

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Call for proposal

(opens in new window) HORIZON-CL5-2023-D1-01

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Coordinator

BARCELONA SUPERCOMPUTING CENTER CENTRO NACIONAL DE SUPERCOMPUTACION
Net EU contribution
€ 1 572 681,25
Address
CALLE JORDI GIRONA 31
08034 BARCELONA
Spain
Region
Este Cataluña Barcelona
Activity type
Research Organisations
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Total cost
No data

Participants (11)

Partners (3)