Climate predictions are our most valuable tools to support socio-economic decision-making from regional to local scales and develop successful adaptation strategies. Their level of accuracy is determined by our understanding of the climate system and our capacity to simulate it correctly. While current prediction models exhibit high skill in predicting sea surface temperature in key regions – like the North Atlantic or the Tropical Pacific – from months to years in advance, their ability to predict the atmospheric circulation and through it the continental climate is undermined by structural model problems. These problems point to a misrepresentation of key processes and interactions. PREDDYCT focuses on the North Atlantic, the region where the structural problems manifest more clearly. Its aim is to bring a new fundamental understanding of the physical mechanisms that need to be realistically simulated to provide climate predictability to its neighbouring continents. The main working hypothesis is that mesoscale eddies – whose contribution is unresolved in current prediction models – are the key element. This is supported by the fact that in the North Atlantic region, resolving the effect of mesoscale ocean eddies and the atmospheric eddy feedback onto the midlatitude jet has been shown to critically improve the realism of air-sea interactions and their influence on the large-scale atmospheric circulation. In light of this, PREDDYCT will combine a new generation of predictions at ground-breaking resolutions, an innovative tuning framework to enhance their accuracy, and extensive process-oriented analyses to, for the first time, resolve and understand the contribution of mesoscale eddies to North Atlantic climate predictability. PREDDYCT’s new conceptual and methodological insights will pave the way for further forecasting advances at the global scale and contribute to achieve a long-awaited breakthrough in the realism and trustworthiness of climate predictions.

A climate resilient society requires reliable monitoring and forecasting information of the climate trends, patterns and disturbances, both at global and regional scales. Through CONsistent representation of temporal variations of boundary Forcings in reanalysES and Seasonal forecasts, CONFESS will contribute to the emerging societal need for an enhanced Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) that can support adaptation and mitigation strategies facing increased frequency and intensity of climate extremes. The aim of CONFESS is to improve the reliability and usability of C3S information in the land-atmosphere coupled system by exploiting new and improved Earth Observations data records of land-use, vegetation states and surface-emitted aerosols delivered across different Copernicus Services. CONFESS developments will be integrated consistently for use in future C3S systems, enhancing the service’s accuracy by representing annual changes of land use, adding satellite-derived and prognostic vegetation states along with aerosols emissions due to hazardous/extreme events such as volcanic eruptions and large-scale biomass burning (e.g. wildfires). The added capacity to represent temporal variations and trends of these variables and the occurrence of hazardous/extreme events will be supported by a rapid uptake of new Earth Observations. The impact on the Earth system will be evaluated on the quality of global reanalysis as well as seasonal forecasts using state-of-the-art modelling systems. The infrastructure and knowledge developed within CONFESS will contribute to improve the C3S capabilities for reliable monitoring and forecasting with particular focus on extremes.

MeDiTwin harnesses the global scientific leadership of advanced partners in AI for Earth Observation, emphasizing physics-guided ML, explainable AI, and causality. It prioritizes an extensive capacity-building agenda, aiming to enhance research capacity and elevate the international standing of NTUA's School of Surveying Engineering and Geoinformatics. This collaboration centers on the development and utilization of the proposed Mediterranean Digital Twin (MDT), a research asset that promises to deepen our understanding of Earth's processes, especially in the context of the climate emergency. Our commitment is demonstrated through an innovative research project focused on modeling climate extremes and impacts in the Mediterranean, addressing crucial global challenges related to climate change.

The winds constantly transfer energy from the atmosphere to the global oceans and seas helping to generate surface waves, currents and tearing water droplets directly from the crests of the steepest waves. The interaction of the wind and the surface ocean is an extremely complex process that still remains to be fully understood by ocean scientists and engineers and remains an active area of research. Perhaps the most fundamental consequence of wind blowing over the surface of the oceans is the generation of waves. Our ability to forecast the generation, evolution, and decay of ocean waves is important for the way humans interact with the global oceans. For example, wave forecasts are routinely used to help shipping companies plan the transport of goods and people across the global oceans, marine engineers need to know how often large waves occur and how these waves will interact with the structures they build for use in the ocean, oceanographers need to predict the how ocean waves affect weather and climate, and recreational sailors, swimmers and surfers rely on accurate wave forecasts to safely enjoy the seas and oceans around our coastline. Of particular interest to oceanographers is the energy balance between the wind and the waves. Since the wind acts as the primary source of energy for the waves, there must be a mechanism for dissipating this energy input, otherwise the waves would continue to grow. Part of this energy dissipation occurs along our coastlines where incoming waves break as they enter shallow water, releasing their energy. This release of energy helps to entrain air into the water, to move sediment and sand, and to create chaotic turbulent water motions. However, the vast majority of wave energy is dissipated by waves breaking in the open ocean. These are easy to spot on a windy day because of the bubbles and white foam they produce, commonly called whitecaps. The importance of these whitecaps to how the Earth's climate evolves is an area of huge interest to oceanographers, atmospheric scientists and climate scientists. Within each whitecap there are thousands of bubbles ranging in size from the width of a human hair to about the width of a 5 pence piece. These bubbles are like tiny replicas of the atmosphere that exchange gas with the surrounding water. This bubble-mediated mechanism of gas transfer is very important to how much carbon dioxide is transferred from the atmosphere to the ocean. When each of these bubbles rises to the water surface and bursts it can send tiny sea spray droplets into the atmosphere, much like the fizz of a glass of soda drink that you see when you look at it from the side. When these tiny droplets are in the atmosphere they can help to form clouds over the ocean, transport bacteria from the ocean surface into the atmosphere and can scatter light from the sun. Gaining a better understanding of how much these bubbles and sea spray droplets matter to the Earth's climate is important to make accurate future projections of the Earth's climate. To tackle these difficult questions, our research will use state of the art wave making facilities to replicate breaking ocean waves in the laboratory at Imperial College, and will photograph whitecaps in the Adriatic Sea where we have access to a unique ocean observing platform that is operated by the Italian Institute of Marine Science. We will use a combination of wave height gauges, digital cameras and stereovision image processing techniques, to measure wave energy, photograph the breaking wave foam, and count the number and measure the size of bubbles generated by the breaking waves. These data will be used to improve computer models of ocean waves, and predictions of the exchange of gas between the atmosphere and the oceans for use in computer models of Earth's climate.