Background

Climate change strongly impacts the whole European territory. Drought severely affects agriculture; precipitation extremes are associated with flooding, severe damage to properties and lives; temperature extremes can increase mortality; the seasonality and availability of snow affects water resources and winter tourism; wind speed or sunshine hours affect the production of renewable energy. These relations can be studied through the computation of climate indices, defined as tailored combinations of climate variables. To be useful, they need to be based on long and reliable climate datasets and be formulated to express relevant and comparable information.

Purpose

The INDECIS project will develop an integrated approach to produce a set of relevant climate indices targeting the high priority sectors of the World Meteorological Organization’s Global Framework for Climate Services (agriculture, disaster risk reduction, energy, health, water) plus tourism. Moreover, models and tools will be developed for near-real time calculation, spatial interpolation, visualization and communication of climate monitoring.

Methods

With these aims, the INDECIS project will inventory and catalog existing datasets of precipitation, temperature, wind speed and sunshine duration. New methods and tools will be developed to operationally assure the quality and homogeneity of data sets. In parallel, information on climate indicators routinely computed by the participating institutions and third parties across Europe will be gathered; works to improve them in consultation with the stakeholdes will be carried out. It is also intended to use statistics and teleconnection indices to explore predictive relations and responses to climate variability and change.

Results

The first results were the integration of the European ECA&D web site with rainfall and temperature data registered in Calabria. Moreover, a methodology was proposed for uncertainty estimation in data series homogenized by means of various techniques. Some sectorial indices were proposed, whose data collection is started involving some local stakeholders.

Products

The Researchers of CNR have participated in writing the deliverables of the project. Moreover, some works were submitted to National (not only in Italy) and International Conferences/Workshops. A paper is being in preparation for submitting to International Journal.