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CLIPC: Constructing Europe's Climate Information Portal

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

Accessing climate data

ClimateClimate
Climate in a narrow sense is usually defined as the average weather, or more rigorously, as the statistical description in terms of the mean and variability of relevant quantities over a period of time ranging from months to thousands or millions of years. The classical period for averaging these variables is 30 years, as defined by the World Meteorological Organization. The relevant quantities are most often surface variables such as temperature, precipitation and wind. Climate in a wider sense is the state, including a statistical description, of the climate system
data search

The climate data search service allows you to search for climate datasets in several important international infrastructures.

Climate data consists of satellite, in situ, re-analysis and climate model data. The CLIPC data discovery service provides users of 'raw' climate data (primarily climate scientists and impact researchers) with an interface to search for data from various connected data infrastructures.

The figure below shows a diagram of the discovery service which allows users (bottom) to search in diverse data resources (top) for data. Discovery of data is facilitated through a faceted search interface that triggers a search harmonisation layer that transforms the search actions to a request that fits the infrastructure (both technically as well as semantic).

 Discovery Services Diagram

Figure 1: Diagram of the discovery service used to achieve harmonised search actions triggered by the user (bottom) to the diverse data resources (top)
 

CLIPC dataset catalogue

The CLIPC dataset (and data product) catalogue isthe key tool to provide information about the CLIPC datasets. It provides metadatametadata
Information about meteorological and climatological data concerning how and when they were measured, their quality, known problems and other characteristics.
and access to the datasets that are validated and processed in the project in order to create the climate impactclimate impact
See Impact Assessment
indicators. The indicators themselves are described as well, and references are given to download mechanisms for the indicators.

Summarising, the catalogue contains metadata of:

  • The biasbias
    The average difference between the values of the forecasts and the observations on the long term. While accuracy is always positive the bias could be either positive of negative depending on the situation.
    corrected datasets from within CLIPC
  • Processed / calculated datasets
  • Tier 1/2/3 climate impact indicators as created and used in the project. Indicators from other sources outside CLIPC have been collected and are also made available
  • Other climate datasets made available through CLIPC services

The catalogue has three main functions:

  • Users can search the catalogue, view metadata details, get links to downloads and visualize the datasets
  • Datasets found in the catalogue can also be selected to be used in the MyClipc processing service where the user can start processing datasets
  • Make the metadata accessible by web crawlers so datasets can also be found using standard search engines (such as Google)

 Data product catalogue overview

Figure 2: Data product catalogue overview