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European Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency
Project

SECLI-FIRM

The added value of seasonal climate forecasting for integrated risk management

SECLI-FIRM project.2
Screenshot from the project's website

The core objective of SECLI-FIRM is to demonstrate how the use of improved climate forecasts, out to several months ahead, can add practical and economic value to decision-making processes and outcomes, primarily in the energy sector, but also in the water sector.

Specifically for the energy sector, the objective is to assess the impact on operational planning and portfolio management, such as hedging and asset optimization, thus enabling quantification of the value-add provided by seasonal forecasts which have been calibrated, evaluated and tailored for each specific application. Improvements in management decisions will ultimately lead to an improved supply-demand balance and therefore to a more efficient energy system, particularly with respect to renewable energy, with corresponding benefits for climate change mitigation.

A simple, but effective, methodology will be used to assess value added. A control case will only utilise climatological conditions based on historical averaged values – currently the most common approach – while a test case will also consider individually optimised and tailored state-of-the-art probabilistic seasonal forecasts. This will be done for nine case studies for Europe and South America, where recent seasons with anomalous/extreme climate conditions have led to problematic and quantifiable impacts for the energy and/or water industry. Crucially for success, the case studies will be co-designed by industrial and research partners.

These case studies will provide the basis for developing pilot climate services for a number of specific applications, allowing evaluation of the added value of near real-time information for decision making.

H2020-funded SECLI-FIRM project promotes research advances in the optimization of seasonal forecasts for specific applications (e.g. by evaluating both local processes and large-scale teleconnections), as well as promoting the uptake of seasonal forecasts by industry and hence the expansion of the climate services market.

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