• Close window

CLIPC: Constructing Europe's Climate Information Portal

CLIPC provides access to Europe's climate data and information.

Getting started - What is CLIPC?

CLIPC provides access to climateclimate
Climate in a narrow sense is usually defined as the average weather, or more rigorously, as the statistical description in terms of the mean and variability of relevant quantities over a period of time ranging from months to thousands or millions of years. The classical period for averaging these variables is 30 years, as defined by the World Meteorological Organization. The relevant quantities are most often surface variables such as temperature, precipitation and wind. Climate in a wider sense is the state, including a statistical description, of the climate system.
information of direct relevance to a wide variety of users, catering for consultant advisers, policy makers, private sector decision makers and scientists, but also interested members of the general public. This “one-stop-shop” platform allows you to find answers to questions related to climate and climate impactclimate impact
See Impact Assessment
.

CLIPC information includes data from satellite and in-situ observations, climate models, data re-analyses, and transformed data products enabling impact assessments and asessment of climate changeclimate change
Climate change refers to a change in the state of the climate that can be identified (e.g., by using statistical tests) by changes in the mean and/or the variability of its properties, and that persists for an extended period, typically decades or longer. Climate change may be due to natural internal processes or external forcings such as modulations of the solar cycles, volcanic eruptions and persistent anthropogenic changes in the composition of the atmosphere or in land use. Note that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), in its Article 1, defines climate change as: 'a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods'. The UNFCCC thus makes a distinction between climate change attributable to human activities altering the atmospheric composition, and climate variability attributa
impact indicators. CLIPC complements existing services such as GMES/Copernicus pre-operational components, but focuses on datasets providing information on climate variabilityclimate variability
Climate variability refers to variations in the mean state and other statistics (such as standard deviations, the occurrence of extremes, etc.) of the climate on all spatial and temporal scales beyond that of individual weather events. Variability may be due to natural internal processes within the climate system (internal variability), or to variations in natural or anthropogenic external forcing (external variability ). See also Climate change
on decadal to centennial time scales from observed and projected climate change impacts in Europe. With that, guidance information on the quality and limitations of all data products is provided.

Furthermore, CLIPC provides a toolbox to generate, compare, manipulate and combine indicators. Expanding climate data volumes are and will be supported with a distributed scalable system, based on international standards. An on-going user consultation process will feed back into all the products developed for some time into the future. Part of the toolbox is integrated with Climate-ADAPT.

A number of use cases has been developed to demonstrate how the functionalities of the CLIPC Impacts Indicator Toolbox can be used to identify, select, compare, combine and rank indicators, for applications in research or decision-support support in policy and practice situations.

CLIPC ensures that the provenance of science and policy relevant data products is well-documented. Clarity of provenance is supported by providing access to intermediate data products. Documentation includes information on the technical quality of data, on metrics related to scientific quality, and on uncertainties in and limitations of the data.

The CLIPC consortium was funded by the European Union’s Seventh framework programme (FP7) and brings together the key institutions in Europe working on developing and making available datasets on climate observations and modelling, and on impact analysis. CLIPC works closely with four concurrent FP7 projects developing pre-operational Copernicus Climate Change services for global re-analyses (ERA-CLIM2, UERRA, QA4ECV and EUCLEIA). 


Go further to: