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“We should try to use our ability to predict future climate conditions for the benefit of society,” says EUPORIAS science coordinator Carlo Buontempo of the UK’s Met Office. “If you look back at the past and the way climate information has been used, it has often been in the form of generic climate portals offering parameters that were believed to be relevant to the users. There are plenty of those portals in Europe – and some of them are very good.”

EUPORIAS takes a different approach to near-term climate predictions, from looking ahead to the next season to up to 10 years into the future. The team is attempting to develop products and services relevant, useable and useful to specific users.

Who are these users? When EUPORIAS started in November 2012, the project partners first came up with a number of proposals for climate prediction prototypes, all based on a pre-defined set of criteria that the ideal climate service should take into account.

Five plus one case studies

An external panel of experts selected five proposals for prototype implementation, which they considered to be the most promising case studies. (A sixth one is exclusively financed by the end-user – an umbrella organisation for the energy sector in Sweden – itself, testament to the commitment to and interest in the EUPORIAS approach.) These case studies include a prototype for predicting local catchment water levels in France, possible transport disruptions in winter and agricultural planning in the UK. Another area of application EUPORIAS is focusing on is the renewable energies sector.

“The renewable energy fraction of the energy mix has increased steadily over recent years. This is great in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, but it also poses a challenge, as its availability fluctuates,” Buontempo points out. “A nuclear power plant can be switched on or off quite rapidly. If you have an extensive wind farm, however, you depend on what the wind does.”

The prototype developed by EUPORIAS is designed to assess wind production over the coming months in Europe. To achieve this, the project team collaborated closely with the system’s potential users, namely energy traders keen on knowing how much wind energy to expect.

Another prototype has been devised in a joint effort with the World Food Programme (WFP) and the government of Ethiopia, aiming to improve current capabilities to predict the number of people who will require food or financial assistance in the coming year. The software currently used for this purpose does not take into account seasonal predictions, but is solely based on current observations. EUPORIAS fed climate predications into the existing software, which will help the government and the WFP to deal with this risk.

Putting prototypes to the test

Up until now, the partners’ work has mainly been theoretical, fleshing out ideas and assessing the prototypes against historical observations. Over the next few months, they will now run each of them under semi-operational conditions at least once, attempting to make a real prediction.

Obviously, the outcome is still uncertain. “These prototypes will be proof-of-concept exercises rather than end-products. It is not even sure yet that the prototypes will all be successful. Out of five prototypes, there may only be one or two success stories and the others might not work,” says Buontempo. “What I think is important – and this will be the project’s legacy, I believe – is what we learnt about interaction with the users, how we managed that interaction and developed something on the basis of the dialogue.”

In addition, EUPORIAS has gathered a wealth of information about who uses climate information in Europe – and how – which is highly relevant to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service and producers of climate information.