EUPORIAS-SPECS

EUPORIAS 3^rd general assembly

SPECS 3^rd general assembly

20^th - 23^rd October 2014
22^nd - 24^th October 2014

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EUropean Provision Of Regional Impact Assessment on a Seasonal-to-decadal timescale

Whilst societies have flourished or collapsed according to their ability of dealing with climate variability and change it is only recently that we have acquired the ability to predict future environmental

conditions. EUPORIAS, a project recently funded by the European Union under the 7th framework programme, intends to improve our ability to maximise the societal benefit of these new technologies.

Working in close relation with a number of European stakeholders the EUPORIAS project wants to develop a few fully working prototypes of climate services addressing the need of specific users and to demonstrate how climate information can become directly usable by decision makers in different sectors. The time horizon is set between a month and a year ahead with the aim of extending it towards the more challenging decadal scale.

During the first two years EUPORIAS has managed to complete a number of critical tasks. A solid understanding of users' needs across the continent is now available thanks to the interviews we have conducted and the analysis of the online survey. Significant progress has also been made on the development of the climate impact models and their interfacing with the seasonal prediction systems. Over the last few months this newly acquired knowledge has also been used in the development of the climate service prototypes that we have selected.

The General Assembly provides the occasion to analyse where we are in the project, discuss the preliminary results and plan for the future activities. It will also give us an occasion to liaise with our colleagues from SPECS.

Seasonal-to-decadal climate Prediction for the improvement of European Climate Services

This project will undertake research and dissemination activities to deliver a new generation of European climate forecast systems, with improved forecast quality and efficient regionalisation tools to produce reliable, local climate information over land at seasonal-to-decadal time scales, and provide an enhanced communication protocol and services to satisfy the climate information needs of a wide range of public and private stakeholders.

The improved understanding and seamless predictions will offer better estimates of the future frequency of high-impact, extreme climatic events and of the prediction uncertainty. New services to convey climate information and its quality will be used.

SPECS will be, among other things, the glue to coalesce the outcome of previous research efforts that hardly took climate prediction into account. It will ensure interoperability so as to easily incorporate their application in an operational context, provide the basis for improving the capacity of European policy making, industry and society to adapt to near-future climate variations and a coordinated response to some of the GFCS components.

SPECS aims to identify the main problems in climate prediction and investigate a battery of solutions from a seamless perspective.

We look forward to seeing you all in Toulouse in October.