The NCAR Climate Risk Management Engine (CRMe)

Many tools and frameworks for processing climate projections have been developed in recent years to meet society’s growing need for robust and relevant climate information. As these tools and frameworks have increased, the complexity of information needed by diverse practioners has also increased. As a result, there are still gaps that hinder the provision of climate information to users in forms that are both usable and actionable. Efficient data processing workflows, effective framing of information, and data delivery all present challenges.

The NCAR Climate Risk Management Engine (CRMe) seeks to bridge these gaps by developing indices and indicators arising from the diverse “bottom-up” needs of practioners and implementing these through discrete, structured, top-down workflows implemented for rapid delivery. CRMe has implemented web-based data services capable of providing focused climate information in usable form, either for a single location or spatially aggregated for entire regions or countries. CRMe is also developing dashboards with users to condense the key climate information into a quick summary for the user based on their application and needs, while still enabling users to efficiently conduct deeper discovery into rich datasets on an as-needed basis.

CRMe supports over 200 application- and sector-oriented climate indices and indicators, including the 27 core Climate Extremes (ETCCDI) indices, a number of human health and heat indices, and ecological indices. Recent additions include novel return period-based indices that provide relevant information about how climate change may impact flood risk, fire risk, drought risk, and tropical cyclone risk. CRMe is also being used to explore wintery precipitation, “nice weather”, and “miserable weather” indices under changing climate. This talk will provide an overview of the CRMe workflows with a focus on several use cases in which bottom-up needs of practitioners were met with innovative efficient workflows and data delivery mechanisms. An ultimate goal of CRMe in the future is to provide efficient and rapid web-based “on-the-fly” capability to allow users to define and calculate custom indices. We welcome partnerships with climate data users, social scientists, policy and decision makers, risk practitioners, and commercial interests as we continue to expand the capabilities of CRMe toward this goal.