Urban Climate Services: Overview of the URCLIM Project

The URCLIM project (www.urclim.eu) develops a general framework to produce integrated Urban Climate Services (IUCS) for urban planners and related stakeholders, using open urban data and regional climate data, and to evaluate the uncertainties. The European interdisciplinary research consortium is composed of research centers of five national meteorological services (Météo-France, France; Royal Meteorological Institute, Belgium; Finnish Meteorological Insititute Finland; Météo-Ro Romania; KNMI, The Netherlands), laboratories in meteorology and in geospatial data sciences (CNRS, France), and the French national mapping agency (IGN).

This consortium naturally encompasses specialists in regional climate and urban climate and air quality, but also specialists of geomatics and urban mapping, socio-economics and researchers having long experiences of collaborative works on urban planning and health impact studies.

High resolution maps of urban parameters for climate studies are built using Open data (such as Open Street Map). Strategies and techniques are developed for downscaling from EuroCORDEX regional data towards the intra-urban scale for several types of urban impacts, such as the Urban Heat Island effect, whereas also rainfalln and air quality will be represented. Impacts and various types of adaptation strategies are being evaluated in a multi-criteria setting, and blue-print Urban Climate Services and smart visualization processes will be produced by the end of the project. This happens in cooperation with stakeholders. Several case studies have been chosen, each located in a different climate, influenced by different geographical features, and with a different urban history, structure, and socioeconomic conditions.

All the partners collaborate on the quantification of various impacts and the design of the Urban Climate Services. Each partner collaborates with local stakeholders of each case study of the project: Brussels and Ghent in Belgium, Paris and Toulouse in France, the Randstad cities (Utrecht, Rotterdam, Amsterdam and The Hague), Helsinki metropolitan region in Finland and Bucharest in Romania. Those are in general from environmental and climate planning, but planners involved in other risks (e.g. emergency response, air quality, transportation) are also engaged. Stakeholders have been participating in special sessions during the general assemblies of the project.

The generic approach followed by the consortium enables further deployment for cities (at least in Europe but possibly anywhere in the world), because: (1) the high-resolution urban maps for these IUCS are based on open data; (2) the World Climate Research Program Euro-Cordex is used as input climate data; (3) the methodologies are open-access, and the technical developments are open-source ; (4) a smart visualization tool is associated to the Urban Climate Services; (5) the Urban Climate Services are developed in common with stakeholders supported by case studies.