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European Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency
Project

EUCP

European Climate Prediction system

Europe from space.2
Sshutterstock: 1492079414

Can governments, businesses and other stakeholders better plan how to deal with the challenges and opportunities brought by a changing climate? Predictions and projections have a concrete potential for this.

The European Climate Prediction research project (EUCP) supports both scientists and climate information providers to produce better information, also directly supplying part of the latter. It develops cutting-edge approaches to using climate predictions and projections, as well as providing new climate simulations, never rolled out before on a European level. This lays the foundation for a future regional climate prediction system for Europe.

EUCP has four objectives, all directly relevant to the work programme and fully meeting its challenge, scope and impact.

1. Develop an innovative ensemble climate prediction system based on high-resolution models for Europe for the near-term (1-40 years), including improved methods used to characterise uncertainty in climate predictions, regional downscaling, and evaluation against observations.

2. Use the climate prediction system to produce consistent, authoritative and actionable climate information. This information will be co-designed with users to constitute a robust foundation for Europe-wide climate service activities to support climate-related risk assessments and climate change adaptation programmes.

3. Demonstrate the value of this prediction system through high impact extreme weather events in the near past and near future drawing on convection permitting regional climate models translated into risk information for, and with, targeted end users.

4. Develop and publish methodologies, good practices and guidance for producing and using authoritative climate predictions for 1-40 year timescale.

The system (objective 1) will combine initialised climate predictions on the multi-annual timescale with longer-term climate projections and high resolution regional downscaling, using observations for evaluation. Methodologies will be developed to characterise uncertainty and to seamlessly blend the predictions and projections. Users will be engaged through active user groups.

The system will be utilised (objective 2) with users to co-produce information suitable for European climate service activities.

A set of demonstrators will show the value of this information in real-world applications with user involvement (objective 3).

Key outputs will include disseminating and publishing the project’s methodologies, user-relevant data and knowledge (objective 4).

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