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CLIPC: Constructing Europe's Climate Information Portal

CLIPC provides access to Europe's climate data and information.

Milestones

This page provides details of the milestones which have been met by the project: 

Related documents


M1 Kickoff meeting
The CLIPC all partners kick-off meeting was held in St. Mary's University College, Twickenham, London from Tues 14th to Thurs 16th January 2014.The meeting was a combination of presentations from other related projects, breakout and discussion sessions to plan the future work of the project. All presentations available on the meeting webpage at http://www.ceda.ac.uk/projects/clipc/meetings/ The meeting report can be found here.


M4 Establishing user groups
User groups have been established in October 2014 following a step wise process.
In June 2014, a database was established with contact information of more than 500 potential users of the CLIPC climate portal and impact toolbox. These potential users mainly included climate scientists, impact researchers and intermediary organisations. These users have been requested to participate in an online survey (July- October, 2014). Through the survey, people have indicated if, and in what way they preferred to participate in the further development of the CLIPC climate portal and impact toolbox. Three types of user groups have been established in October, 2014. These three groups, only partially overlapping, include climate scientists, impact researchers and intermediary organisations.
13 users will participate in interviews to specify user requirements26 users will participate in  panel workshops to consolidate user requirement and provide feedback on early versions of the portal and indicator toolbox18 users will take part in a user panel and will provide periodically feedback on the evolving platform Partners participating in the realisation of the milestone include: Climate Service Center 2.0 TEC, Alterra and MetNo.


M5 Requirements workshop
The user requirements workshop was held in Amsterdam, 3rd Feb 2015. Meeting documents can be found here. 


M7 User requirements paper
Paper in press: Swart, R.J., K. de Bruin, S. Dhenain, G. Dubois, A. Groot, E. von der Forst, 2016. Developing climate information portals with users : promises and pitfalls. Submitted to Climate ServicesClimate Services
Climate services involve the production, translation, transfer, and use of climate knowledge and information for decision making, policy and planning. The provision of climate information (observational, forecasts or projections) in a way that is relevant to climate-sensitive users, can inform decisions and can reduce the risk of misinterpretation..

M8 Administrative portal (v1)
The administrative portal was late (M9/10) but has been delivered. A first version of this portal however was already running via the CEDA website. A new administrative portal took longer thann expected due to delay in gathering the first content. This provided however no major obstacle for the project.


M13 Visualisation framework
The goal of data visualisation is to provide interactive maps and charts in the CLIPC portal, showing e.g. urban heat islands for Europe. Several maps and products based on multiple climate scenarios and thresholds should be easily selectable, enabling policy makers to compare current climate to future scenariosscenarios
Scenarios can be thought of as stories of possible futures. They allow the description of factors that are difficult to quantify. In the context of climate change scenarios are used for the future development of factors such as governance, social structures, future population growth, technical development and agriculture. These descriptions are essential to model the future climate.. The creation of these maps involve inclusion of several datasets, application of several algorithms and manual design work. 

For creating these maps existing tooling will be used. In general, Tier 1 products are less complicated to build than Tier 3 products. Calculation and visualization of model data and Tier 1 products is currently possible in the climate4impact portal using the ADAGUCADAGUC
Atmospheric data access for the geospatial user community. Read more on the ADAGUC Website. visualization framework. Maps and data offered by this system can be combined with other geographical data from other resources. It is possible to export data to dedicated desktop GISGIS
Geographical Information System. GIS is designed to capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage and present geographical data. packages and tools like InDesign to enable manual fine tuning. Tier 3 products are complicated to build and require manual expertise from specialists to provide meaningful results. Finally, interactive maps can be presented in the CLIPC portal. The steps required to do so is shown below:

 
Step 1 Calculation of Tier 1 indices. Tier 1 calculation can be achieved at climate4impact. The results can be visualized and manipulated (ADAGUC WMS), products can be made suitable for InDesign. Visualizations, results and processing from climate4impact can be made accessible directly to the CLIPC portal. Data can be converted using Web Coverage Services to any projection and format, allowing data to be used in dedicated design tools like Adobe InDesign and ESRI ArcGIS

Step 2 Calculation of Tier 2 products. This this can possibly be accomplished at climate4impact:  Tier 1 products can be re-used and combined to form Tier 2 products. Tier 2 requires combination of several data sources with different origin and format and is more complicated than the creation of Tier1 products.

Step 3 Tier 3 products. Highly specialized product, is made by specialists and cannot be automated. Interpretation and integration of Tier 2 products and statistics. Maps and graphs are made using Adobe InDesign. End products can be interactive PDF documents or customized web applications.

Step 4 Publish on CLIPC portal. Please note: not all visualization work can be fully automated. It requires work of specialists and interaction with users to create these informative visualizations.

ADAGUC
ADAGUC is a geographical information system to visualize NetCDF files or OpenDAPOpenDAP
Open-source Project for a Network Data Access Protocol, is a data transport architecture and protocol widely used by earth scientists. The protocol is based on HTTP and the current specification is OPeNDAP 2.0 draft. OPeNDAP includes standards for encapsulating structured data, annotating the data with attributes and adding semantics that describe the data. The protocol is maintained by OPeNDAP.org, a publicly-funded non-profit organization that also provides free reference implementations of OPeNDAP servers and clients. [Source: Wikipedia] data resources via the web. The software consists of a server side C++ application and a client side JavaScript application. The software provides several features to access and visualize data over the web, it uses widely adopted OGCOGC
Open Geospatial Consortium - Visit website standards for data dissemination. The spatial data infrastructure is based on OGC compliant web services. These web services include Web Mapping Services (WMS) for online visualization, Web Feature Services (WFS) for downloading vector data and Web Coverage Services (WCS) for downloading raster data. 

Interoperability with other WMS systems
ADAGUC consists of a client server architecture which is tightly coupled, but the system keeps its interoperability with other WMS services. The server and client can be used standalone as well. Data served with the ADAGUC server can be visualized in any WMS compatible web based tool like OpenLayers, Leaflet or GoogleMaps. For desktop applications GoogleEarth, ArcMap and QuantumGIS can be used. The client is tested extensively with other WMS servers like UMN MapServer, GeoServer and ncWMS.

Multidimensional data with time and elevation components (t, z, x, y)
Data with a time component and/or elevation component (pressure in Pa or height in meters) can be online selected and visualized. ADAGUC is designed to work with N-dimensional datasets, it can also visualize datasets consisting of several model members or ensembles. It keeps full interoperability with the WMS standard at all times. The data itself needs to comply to the Climate and Forecast (CF) conventions. Most of the datasets offered in the ESGFESGF
The Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) is an international collaboration with a current focus on serving the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) and supporting climate and environmental science in general. The ESGF grew out of the larger Global Organization for Earth System Science Portals (GO-ESSP) community, and reflects a broad array of contributions from the collaborating partners. system do comply to these conventions.


M14 Story line visualisation prototype
Tier 3 visualisation of the story line was shown at the user workshop on 3 February 2015. Now working on integration of the story in the CLIPC portal.


M24 First climate datasets
The web page became live on October 6 2014. 

The web page was updated on 17 June 2016.

EURO4M MESAN data - European high-resolution surface reanalysis http://exporter.nsc.liu.se/53bad73d5f2346c5b1a26d849afb82f1/

This simple web page provides basic introduction to the dataset and links to various online documentation sources regarding the dataset and the underlying methods, as well as to some evaluation exercises carried out within EURO4M. It is a temporary solution while the final details of the metadatametadata
Information about meteorological and climatological data concerning how and when they were measured, their quality, known problems and other characteristics. standards and DRS is settled so that the data can be moved to ESGF for 'official dissemination', but that work is part of WP5 and not part of M24. The outstanding details that need to be finalised will most probably not cause any problems when using the data within CLIPC. As the data is 'free for all uses' the web link can be published on the CLIPC web. But this temporary and ad hoc web service has limited capacity meaning that if the external demand becomes high we might have to close it down. 
Regarding Milestone M24 "First climate datasets", other datasets that are relevant are already well known and widely disseminated. Here are some key ones listed:

Note that these datasets may come with various access and usage limitations.


M25 Bias-corrected climate model data
A first version of MS25 was made available at the beginning of Feb 2015. It is a simple webpage with some very basic documentation and links to the data files. Currently, there is one GCM/RCM combination available at two resolutions (the CordexCordex
Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment EUR44 and EUR11 domains, at ~50km and ~12km spatial resolution), and for the RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 scenarios.
http://exporter.nsc.liu.se/b780c1ede6904458829bae06bb99779d


M35 Scenario-based exploration: methodology
This has been integrated into D8.2 Scenario based indicator exploration.


M43 Dissemination plan
The first draft of the dissemination plan was presented to the project team at the CLIPC kick-off meeting in January 2014. It was subsequently refined and presented again at the work package leaders' meeting in Schiphol, on Fri 16th May 2014. The dissemination plan deliverable was submitted early, on 20 November 2014.