Services

The CLIME service has been specialized to provide climate analyses using the high resolution climate projections developed by CMCC but also available through other programs and projects.

Currently CLIME provides post-processing of high resolution climate projections developed by CMCC over Italian domain (Bucchignani et al., 2015, Zollo et al; 2015), but also from the projections of the EURO-CORDEX program* at the highest resolution currently available (about 12 km).
It also manages different observational dataset, for example E-OBS gridded dataset (Haylock et al. 2008), EURO4M dataset (Isotta et al., 2014) but also regional/local meteorological station data.

This service, therefore, allows to use the climate data with a multi-model approach and with uncertainty evaluation (Jacob, 2014), (Kotlarski, 2014) from national up to local level (e.g. NUT3 areas or municipality).

The simulated data are available for three Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP2.6, RCP4.5, and RCP8.5). Currently five climate variables are available in the service: maximum temperature, minimum temperature, mean temperature, precipitation and humidity (additional variables can be added under user’s request). Currently, historical data (based on the IPCC historical experiment) are available starting from 1971 while climate projections over the period 2006-2100 (additional time periods can be considered considering user request).

*EURO-CORDEX is the European branch of the international CORDEX initiative, which is a program sponsored by the World Climate Research Program (WRCP, http://wcrp-cordex.ipsl.jussieu.fr/) to organize an internationally coordinated framework to produce improved regional climate change projections for all land regions world-wide. The CORDEX-results will serve as input for climate change impact and adaptation studies within the timeline of the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and beyond. More information on the EURO-CORDEX initiative are available at the following link http://www.euro-cordex.net. The size and location of the CORDEX domains can be seen on the CORDEX web page (http://wcrp-cordex.ipsl.jussieu.fr/). The EURO-CORDEX domain covers all countries in the European Union, but it does not map perfectly to the Europe region defined for the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report

Bucchignani E, Montesarchio M, Zollo AL, Mercogliano P (2016) High-resolution climate simulations with COSMO-CLM over Italy: performance evaluation and climate projections for the 21st century. Int J Climatol 36:735–756. doi: 10.1002/joc.4379.

Haylock MR, Hofstra N, Tank AMGK, et al (2008) A European daily high-resolution gridded data set of surface temperature and precipitation for 1950-2006. J Geophys Res. doi: 10.1029/2008jd010201.

Isotta FA, Frei C. et al 2014. The climate of daily precipitation in the Alps: development and analysis of a high-resolution grid dataset from pan-Alpine rain-gauge data. Int. J. Climatol. 34: 1657–1675, doi: 10.1002/joc.3794.

Jacob D, Petersen J, Eggert B, et al (2014) EURO-CORDEX: new high-resolution climate change projections for uropean impact research. Reg Environ Chang 14:563–578. doi: 10.1007/s10113-013-0499-2.

Kotlarski S, Keuler K, Christensen OB, et al (2014) Regional climate modeling on European scales: A joint standard evaluation of the EURO-CORDEX RCM ensemble. Geosci Model Dev 7:1297–1333. doi: 10.5194/gmd-7-1297-2014.