Project background
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, from scientists to policy makers and private sector decision makers. Information will include data from satellite and in-situ observations, climate models and re-analyses, as well as transformed data products to enable impacts assessments and composing 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. The platform will complement existing GMES/Copernicus pre-operational components, but will focus on datasets which provide 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, and will provide a toolbox to generate, compare and rank key indicators. Expanding climate data volumes will be supported with a distributed, scalable system, based on international standards. Guidance information on the quality and limitations of all data products will be provided. An on-going user consultation process will feed back into all the products developed within the project.
The “one-stop-shop” platform will allow users to find answers to their questions related to climate and climate impacts data, and to ensure that the provenance of science and policy relevant data products is thoroughly documented. Clarity of provenance will be supported by providing access to intermediate data products. Documentation will include information on the technical quality of data, on metrics related to scientific quality, and on uncertainties in and limitations of the data.
The climate impact toolkit provides documentation on methods and data sources used to generate and use climate impact indicators. Part of the toolkit will be made available for integration with Climate-ADAPT.
The CLIPC consortium brings together the key institutions in Europe working on developing and making available datasets on climate observations and modelling, and on impact analysis.
CLIPC will work closely with four concurrent FP7 projects developing pre-operational Copernicus Climate Change services for global re-analyses (ERA-CLIM2, UERRA, QA4ECV and EUCLEIA).