The climate system is changing rapidly and some regions have seen increases in extremes beyond what is expected from climate model simulations. To support targeted climate adaptation strategies, EXPECT will enable trustworthy assessments and predictions of regional climate change including extremes by developing a prototype operational capability for integrated attribution and prediction of climate. This ambitious goal is closely aligned with the WCRP Lighthouse Activity on Explaining and Predicting Earth System Change. EXPECT will identify and quantify the mechanisms by which physical processes govern regional climatic changes, including extremes, on inter-annual to multi-decadal time scales. It will do so by exploiting newly available climate simulations and Earth Observations (EOs), and by combining machine learning (ML) with physical methods. The research will target fundamental knowledge gaps related to atmospheric circulation and land-atmosphere interactions, which represent major limitations in current climate predictions and projections, and in particular in understanding changes in European summer extremes. To underpin the research, and benefitting the wider research community, EXPECT will develop tools to efficiently analyse a variety of large data sets in combination that are hosted in different repositories across institutions. This will facilitate the exploitation of recent investments into high-resolution climate models and EO data. EXPECT will further build data science capacity for the scientifically robust, efficient and reproducible analysis of the massive data assets, including novel ML approaches, and provide training for the climate science community and the next generation of researchers in particular. EXPECT will thus deliver significant scientific and technological advances for society and the climate science community that will last well beyond the project, in support of WCRP’s strategic objectives.

Urban areas are very vulnerable to climate change impacts, because of the high concentration of people, infrastructure, and economic activity, but also because cities tend to exacerbate climate extremes such as heat waves and flash floods. The objective of the Pan-European Urban Climate Service (PUCS) project is to establish a service that translates the best available scientific urban climate data into relevant information for public and private end-users operating in cities. This will be achieved by demonstrating the benefits of urban climate information to end-users, considering the sectors of energy, cultural heritage, mobility, energy, health, and urban planning. During the first half of the 30-month project, end-users (included as partners) and climate service providers will be involved in the co-design/-development of six concrete sectoral cases, to be implemented in Antwerp, Barcelona, Bern, Prague, Rome, and Vienna. Each of these cases will be subject to a detailed socio-economic impact analysis, quantifying the benefits of using urban climate information. The second half of the project will focus on upscaling and market replication, initially aiming at the extension with six new cases, involving new (non-financed) end-users. Through a business development strategy, supported by dissemination and marketing activities, we ultimately aim at acquiring six more cases by the end of the project, involving new business intermediaries without PUCS project financing, and demonstrating the long-term market viability of the service. PUCS aims at a genuine market uptake of (urban) climate services, based on a distributed network of local business intermediaries throughout Europe, enhancing the awareness for urban climate-related issues in the end-user community, and converting (mature) research results into tailored added-value information, thus removing important barriers for the deployment of urban climate services.

In an interconnected world, Europe’s economy will be increasingly affected by climate change impacts that occur beyond its border. The movement of goods and services, people and capital occurs at ever increasing rates and volumes. This complex network reveals Europe’s globalized climate exposure, vulnerability and risk structure, through which both gradual and sudden impacts of climatic features at any location on the world (hurricanes, droughts, melting ice sheets) propagate, ultimately impacting Europe’s socio-economic welfare. Public awareness of Europe’s sensitivity to global climate impacts is steadily growing. In order to provide relevant and quantitative information on the European risks from remote global climatic features, RECEIPT will develop and implement a novel stakeholder driven storytelling concept that maps representative connections between European socio-economic activities and remote climatic hazards. Using a limited number of storylines designed for selected sectors, RECEIPT h

The overall objective of PolarRES is to provide new insights into key local-regional scale physical and chemical processes for atmosphere-ocean-ice interactions in the Arctic and Antarctic, their responses to, and influence on, projected changes in the global circulation and their implications for society and the environment. PolarRES will zoom into the climate of both Polar regions with state-of-the-art regional climate models (RCMs), run at unprecedented resolutions, to investigate the influence of projected changes in the global circulation on the climate of the Arctic and Antarctic. Polar climates in a global context remains poorly understood and thus climate change projections in Polar regions have large uncertainties and this hampers mitigation and adaptation efforts. PolarRES proposes an innovative ‘storyline’ approach and novel analysis methods to address these challenges. We will accomplish this by exploiting the recent CMIP6 global climate model (GCM) projections and novel developments in GCMs such as variable resolution grids. High-resolution regional projections will be co-designed with and exploited by impact modellers to produce impact-relevant projections of future climate change for both Polar regions. PolarRES will combine these high-resolution simulations from state-of-the-art RCMs and next generation fully coupled RCMs with a comprehensive range of existing and novel observations (e.g. YOPP and MOSAiC) including satellite products from relevant projects funded by the ESA Earth Observation Programme. The consortium consists of leading European groups in the areas of polar-lower latitude teleconnections, polar oceanography, meteorology, climatology, biogeochemistry, global climate modelling, and regional climate modelling in the Arctic and Antarctic. PolarRES will contribute to the EU Strategy on Climate Action and EU strategy for international cooperation in R&I.

IMproving PRedictions and management of hydrological EXtremes For a better anticipation on future high impact hydrological extremes disrupting safety of citizens, agricultural production, transportation, energy production and urban water supply, and overall economic productivity, prediction and foresighting capabilities and their intake in these strategic sectors need to be improved. IMPREX will improve forecast skill of meteorological and hydrological extremes in Europe and their impacts, by applying dynamic model ensembles, process studies, new data assimilation techniques and high resolution modeling. Novel climate change impact assessment concepts will focus at increasing the realism of relevant events by specific high resolution regional downscaling, explore compounding trans-sectoral and trans-regional risks, and design new risk management paradigms. These developments are demonstrated in impact surveys for strategic economic sectors in a set of case studies in which local stakeholders, public organizations and SMEs are involved. A pan-European assessment of risk management and adaptation strategies is applied, minimizing risk transfer from one sector or region to another. As a key outreach product, a periodic hydrological risk outlook for Europe is produced, incorporating the dynamic evolution of hydro-climatic and socio-economic processes. The project outreach maximizes the legacy impact of the surveys, aimed at European public stakeholder and business networks, including user-friendly assessment summaries, and training material. The project responds to the call by targeting the quality of short-to-medium hydro-meteorological predictions, enhancing the reliability of future climate projections, apply this information to strategic sectoral and pan-European surveys at different scales, and evaluate and adapt current risk management strategies. With its integrative approach, IMPREX will link current management decisions and actions with an emergent future.