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HEIndividual fellowship2023–2025

CIRCE · City-oriented Impacts of Regional Climate for Europe

Horizon Europe — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Duration
2023-07-01 → 2025-06-30
EU contribution
€173,847
Participants
1
Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF

Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.

Results in brief

City-oriented Impacts of Regional Climate for Europe

More than half of the world's population lives in urban areas, a figure that rises to 75% for European residents. Due to ongoing global anthropogenic changes, such as climate change and urbanisation, city dwellers are facing increasing pressure and adverse weather and climate effects. In order to adapt to these challenges and build resilient cities, urban planners, stakeholders and decision-makers need high-resolution climate information tailored to their needs (e.g. in terms of spatial resolution, time horizon or impact indicators). Today, most of the climate information produced at the local level comes from regional climate models (RCMs) that are used to refine global climate projections made by global climate models (GCMs) (e.g. CORDEX, Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment). One of the problems is that, historically, most regional climate models did not represent cities in great detail due to their still too coarse horizontal resolution (on the order of tens of kilometres) and because they did not activate the physical parameterisations dedicated to urban areas. Thanks to improvements in computing resources, a new generation of high-resolution (a few kilometres) regional climate models (known as convection-permitting regional climate models, or CPMs) has been developed over the last decade. These models enable more complex areas to be studied thanks to their increased resolution, such as mountainous areas, coastlines and cities. As part of the CIRCE project, we are using the largest ensemble of high-resolution regional climate simulations produced as part of the CORDEX Flagship Pilot Study on convective phenomena (FPS-Convection) of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP). These simulations have been widely used to study the added value of the new generation of models compared to their predecessors in representing extreme events such as heavy precipitation or heat waves, but they are being used here for the first time to study the urban climate of European cities. The project is structured around two main areas, with a particular focus on evaluating the different types of models, the uncertainties associated with each type of configuration, and the second part focusing on the expected effects of these choices on climate impact projections.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union

Project objective

Extreme weather events are already affecting urban areas with sometimes severe impacts on people, infrastructure and socio-economic activities. Faced with these effects, which are expected to increase due to climate change, decision-makers need sound climate information on local urban issues in order to better plan the cities of tomorrow.Today, climate change impacts on urban areas are assessed by separate scientific communities, with some methodological limitations for each approach: Regional Climate Models (RCM) provide climate change information at the regional scale, but with a coarse horizontal resolution for cities and without specific surface parameterisation for urban processes; most high-resolution impact studies focusing on urban issues (energy, thermal comfort) do not take into account urban-regional climate interactions and are city and indicator dependent.The CIRCE project aims to develop a more robust and generic methodology for assessing the impacts of climate change on European cities by (1) identifying innovative impact indicators that are relevant for local decision-makers and can be calculated from modelled and available city data and (2) clarifying the best current regional climate modelling configurations for urban impact studies. To this end, the new generation of high-resolution Convective-Permitting Models (CPM) will be used for the first time in a multi-city ensemble approach. Multi-sectoral indicators will be defined based on local climate risks (with a focus on heat waves and extreme precipitation) and urban issues related to various European cities. The ability of climate models to simulate specific extreme climate events and their impacts on cities will be assessed. Then, their future evolution will be analysed by combining the largest set of RCMs and CPMs currently available. The final objective will be to co-develop an urban climate service demonstrator based on these results and to feed into the CORDEX Flagship Pilot Study URB-RCC.

Original text from CORDIS.

Participants

  • HELMHOLTZ-ZENTRUM HEREON GMBH · GeesthachtCoordinatorGermany

Links

Data: CORDIS, © European Union