Regional Climate Information for Society

TITLE: Regional Climate Information for Society

AUTHORS:

Sara C. Pryor, Cornell University, Ithaca NY, USA (sp2279@cornell.edu)

Dragana Bojovic, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Barcelona, Spain (Dragana.bojovic@bsc.es)

Sonia I. Seneviratne, ETH, Zurich, Switzerland (sonia.seneviratne@ethz.ch)

Xuebin Zhang, Pacific Climate Impact Consortium, Victoria, Canada (xuebin.zhang@ec.gc.ca)

Paul Block, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA (paul.block@wisc.edu).

Morten Andreas Dahl Larsen, The Danish Meteorological Institute, Copenhagen, Denmark (mla@dmi.dk)

Lincoln Muniz Alves, National Institute for Space Research (INPE), Brazil (lincoln.alves@inpe.br)

Louis-Philippe Caron, Ouranos, Canada (caron.louis-philippe@ouranos.ca)

ABSTRACT:

There is an urgent need for climate science research to be performed within a context of decision support at the local/regional scale. Effective decision support fundamentally relies on provision of actionable, traceable and authoritative climate information that is designed with the stakeholder goals as paramount. This raises several key challenges related to how to optimally configure co-production of projects and perform integration and reconciliation of multiple lines of climate information. It further requires even more effective tools for making climate projections and predictions of stakeholder relevant variables articulated at usable scales. In part to meet this need a new Core Project has been established within the World Climate Research Program (WCRP) called Regional Information for Society (RIfS). This project represents a new and exciting direction for WCRP. It is designed to facilitate international knowledge exchange regarding best practice and to stimulate and support innovation and uptake in climate service provision.

RIfS is designed to address three overarching grand challenges:

1) How to optimally identify, understand, and model the relevant climate processes and their interactions which are most critical to manage the socio-ecological risks at the decision scales within regions.

2) How to optimally integrate multiple lines of evidence from observations, understanding of physical climate processes, and data from dynamical and statistical regional and global models to inform society’s climate information needs.

3) How to best undertake engagement between stakeholders and the science community in different regional contexts to maximize the information benefit for the stakeholder and ensure that the user context is integrated into the design and execution of relevant climate research.

To address these grand challenges the RIfS landscape is designed around four interrelated, overlapping and co-dependent thematic clusters:

• Cluster (i): New and improved tools for making multi-decadal climate projections.
• Cluster (ii): New and improved tool for seasonal-to-decadal climate predictions.
• Cluster (iii): New and innovative Global Extremes Platform (GEP) for collation and dissemination of knowledge and data/indices to characterize the occurrence and morphology of extreme events and to make attribution and projection analyses (including use of storylines).
• Cluster (iv): New more effective ways to communicate with and engage stakeholders in knowledge exchange processes.

Clusters (i), (ii) and (iii) have a clear emphasis on quantifying credibility of climate projections and predictions viewed through the lens of variables (direct and derived) of importance to stakeholder communities, and are all strongly embedded in Cluster (iv).

Here we describe RIfS objectives, thematic context, and action items. We begin by addressing one of the main challenges to climate risk assessment that could support adaptation public policy planning and implementation across multiple levels, particularly at the national, subnational, and sector levels – access to credible and useful information. We illustrate this process using two examples of national initiatives; the Danish Climate Atlas that focusses on description and projections of geophysical conditions in municipality, drainage basin and coastal stretch levels (https://en.klimatilpasning.dk/tools/climate-atlas/) and the AdaptaBrasil MCTI platform (https://adaptabrasil.mcti.gov.br/) that is being developed to consolidate, integrate, and disseminate robust information in a centralized and easily accessible manner. The goals and objectives of these platforms are similar but distinct. For example, while the Danish Climate Atlas is strongly grounded in dissemination of projections of geophysical properties (e.g. precipitation), in the case of the AdaptaBrasil MCTI platform the goal is to provide greater awareness and understanding of how both climatic and non-climatic aspects are interrelated in generating risks to society. We discuss how these platforms are being designed, what features are proving particularly useful and document how the platforms are being used. We then provide examples of current research activities being conducted within RIfS. The first example draws on a project at the climate-energy intersection within the US. This research embodies the RIfS perspective in a number of ways: i) the project goals were designed within a co-production framework, ii) the climate tools were used to develop predictions and projections of wind power production (i.e. an industry relevant variable) and iii) the results are now being disseminated not only by the climate scientists who performed the research but also by the stakeholder within their professional network. The second example draws on a project conducted in Canada where multiple lines of evidence from research of past changes (and their causes) as well as future projections in weather and climate extremes were assessed. The results were then used to inform the creation of new codes and standards that factor in climate change for Canadian buildings, roads, and highways. The third example illustrates how seasonal-to-subseasonal hydro-climate predictions have been leveraged to trigger anticipatory action, particularly for floods, in connection with humanitarian organizations. Decisions regarding which actions to take at what lead times are community or institutionally driven. If a prediction trigger is met, financing is released to support preparedness actions. Such approaches are still in their infancy yet represent a major opportunity for disaster management. We also show how the concept of storylines in conjunction with a cascade of models can be used to inform policymakers on the impact of climate change on low river flow, and its associated consequences on ecosystems and anthropogenic use.