“Building the daily observations database for the European Climate Assessment” KNMI.nl CLARIS meeting, 7 july 2005

Claris goals: “Complementary to the modelling aspect, it is a major goal for CLARIS to initiate the setting-up of a high- quality daily climate database for temperature and precipitation. The European expertise acquired through the European Climate Assessment Project will be essential to meet this objective. The resulting database will be of great value to validate and evaluate the model skills in simulating climate trends and extreme event frequency changes.”

Guide: 1. European Climate Assessment project 2. Daily observations database 3. Current activities 4. Take away messages

Guide: 1. European Climate Assessment project 2. Daily observations database 3. Current activities 4. Take away messages

The ECA project: initiated by EUMETNET in 1998; coordinated by KNMI at present 43 participants (data holding institutions) from 39 countries (WMO-RA VI) station data is collated and processed at KNMI joint report issued in 2002; next report in 2006 results have been used for impact studies (e.g. EEA)

Guide: 1. European Climate Assessment project 2. Daily observations database 3. Current activities 4. Take away messages

Source: IPCC TAR, Chapter 2

Daily observations database: at present over 300 station series (TX,TN,TG, RR starting 1950 or earlier) same quality control procedures applied to all series four common homogeneity tests applied to all series core set of extremes indices calculated joint paper describing the ECA dataset published in Int. J. of Climatol, 2002 contribution to GCOS Surface Network and worldwide analyses of extremes by CLIVAR/WMO

public website presents: 1. about 75% of the daily series for free download in ASCII and DODS 2. all indices results including time series plots and trend maps note that all software we used is public domain (database: MySQL statistics: R web logics: PHP)

Temperature Precipitation Source: Wijngaard, Klein Tank and Können, Int. J. of Climatol., 2003

Guide: 1. European Climate Assessment project 2. Daily observations database 3. Current activities 4. Take away messages

The ECA&D project: fill gaps & update series using SYNOPs from GTS (enables monitoring type of products) interrupted station series nearby station SYNOPs blended series

The ENSEMBLES project: the daily observations database of ECA is considerably extended and improved in the ENSEMBLES-EU-FP6 project (ENSEMBLE-based Predictions of Climate Changes and their Impacts) a daily gridded dataset is produced for Europe at 20x20 km 2 resolution for comparisons with regional models, impact studies, etc. (due September 2007)

Guide: 1. European Climate Assessment project 2. Daily observations database 3. Current activities 4. Take away messages

Take away message: 1. joint work on the data and maintenance is crucial for success: frequently update series and indices results, continue data QC and homogeneity analysis 2. the ECA platform, which is now also used as the basis for the ENSEMBLES grids, has proven to be suitable for easy data access, indices calculations, and inclusion of new monitoring products 3. CLARIS participants are welcome to use ECA software, source code, expertise, etc.

the end … questions? htpp://eca.knmi.nl mailto: KNMI.nl