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IFCA's contribution in AR6 of IPCC on climate change

    


  • -The new report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - IPCC (Working Group I, Physical Bases) has been presented in Geneva and has an outstanding Spanish participation. The IPCC Interactive Atlas, a novel tool in the report, has been developed in a public-private collaboration between IFCA and Predictia, a Spanish technology-based company.

  • -The report reveals that climate change is already affecting all regions of the world. A group of 15 researchers from IFCA and the Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Cantabria participated in the report.

  • -To support these new technologies, CSIC becomes one of the four world centers supporting IPCC through the IPCC Data Distribution Center (together with the DKRZ in Germany, CEDA in England and CIESIN in the United States). CSIC participates through the PTI-Clima and, in particular, through the Institute of Physics of Cantabria (IFCA, CSIC-UC).
 August 9, 2021


     

The Instituto de Física de Cantabria (IFCA, CSIC-UC) has had a prominent participation in the new IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report on climate change, which was presented this morning at the headquarters of the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva. The report reveals that climate change is already affecting all regions of the world in different ways through various combinations of extreme events and shock-triggering processes.

   

Three working groups


IPCC's activity is organized in three working groups: physical bases (Group I), impacts and adaptation (Group II) and mitigation measures (Group III) of climate change. The report presented corresponds to the physical bases of climate change and involves more than three years of research where all the scientific literature, data and projections of existing models have been reviewed and evaluated, culminating in a two-week approval phase, in which the delegations of the 195 member countries have discussed and approved the report by consensus. For their part, the reports of the other two working groups continue to be developed in parallel and will be presented throughout 2022.


Thirteen chapters


The report is organized in thirteen chapters and one of the main novelties is its regional approach, which analyzes how climate change is affecting the different regions of the world along four chapters (from 10 to 12, plus the Atlas). Chapter 10 analyzes the challenges posed by regional analysis of climate change and introduces the methodology used in the other chapters; Chapter 11 focuses on extreme phenomena and their recent trends and projections in the different regions of the world and Chapter 12 analyzes phenomena and indexes that generate impacts (coining a new term, climatic impact-drivers), relevant to Working Group II. Finally, the Atlas synthesizes all the changes region by region, using a new set of reference regions (46 land and 12 ocean regions).


Four Spanish researchers


The work of the four Spanish authors who have participated in this report has focused mainly on this block of regional chapters: Sergio Faria, researcher at the Basque Center for Climate Change (BC3), has authored Chapter 1, which provides the framework, context and methods of the report. Francisco Doblas, from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), has coordinated Chapter 10, which introduces the methodological framework for the regional analysis of climate change. Sergio Vicente Serrano from the Pyrenean Institute of Ecology (IPE-CSIC) has 2 out of 4 authored Chapter 11, analyzing extremes and particularly droughts. Finally, José Manuel Gutiérrez, researcher at the Institute of Physics of Cantabria (IFCA, CSIC-UC), has coordinated the Atlas, which synthesizes changes region by region, and has also coordinated a new tool, the Interactive Atlas, which allows visualizing and flexibly analyze this information.


   

Interactive Atlas


The participation of the IFCA and the UC Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science in this report is especially relevant since, in addition to coordinating the Atlas, they have provided human and technical support for the development of the Interactive Atlas. This atlas is a novel product of the report that allows a flexible spatial and temporal analysis of the results through different dimensions of analysis (for example, projections of future periods for different scenarios or levels of global warming), using different visual tools for the analysis of global and regional information.


The Interactive Atlas includes two components: The first, 'Regional Information', provides access to information on climate change (derived variables and indices) from the main data sets used in the report (global and regional observations and projections: CMIP5 , CMIP6 and CORDEX). The second component, ‘Regional Synthesis’, summarizes and synthesizes the main results of the report on the regional assessment of climate change for different types of phenomena that trigger impacts (heat, droughts, sea level, etc.) in the reference regions. The Atlas not only supports the report chapters, but also the Summary for Policy Makers with the latter component.



   The Atlas synthesizes all the climate changes using a new set of reference regions 46 land and 12 ocean regions. / IPCC


IFCA's participation


IFCA and the University of Cantabria have supported the development of this Interactive Atlas of the IPCC within the framework of the Interdisciplinary Thematic Platform Climate and Climate Services (PTI-Climate), which integrates groups from the CSIC, organizations and companies interested in the development of climate services. The technical development of this novel tool has been carried out as a public-private collaboration with Predictia, a Spanish technology-based company with which the AdapteCCa “viewer of climate change scenarios” had already been created, in collaboration with the Spanish Office of Climate Change (OECC) and the State Meteorological Agency (AEMET), and that constitutes the germ of the development of the IPCC Interactive Atlas. In addition to technical development, IFCA provides support for the ‘deployment’, which will be housed in the Institute's infrastructures and the maintenance of the Interactive Atlas, for a minimum period of three years. For this, the CSIC has joined the IPCC Data Distribution Center, of which the DKRZ in Germany, CEDA in England and CIESIN in the United States were already part, being the fourth world organization that supports the IPCC.


Support activities will focus on the maintenance of these new technologies and also on curation (the process of identifying what data sources are needed and locating that data so that users can interact with, understand and use it) and data storage ( in particular the data used for the development of the Interactive Atlas). The human effort that this development has entailed translates into a total of 15 people involved from IFCA and the UC Meteorology and Computing Group, whose work has been participation in the development of Atlas and the management of the Cloud infrastructure, Supercomputing , storage and user support. The elaboration of the Atlas has involved the analysis of more than 100 TB of information (data from observations and model simulations) that have been consolidated by the Santander Climate Data Service and whose analysis and 3 of 4 post-processing have required more than 500,000 hours of work in the Altamira supercomputing cluster and 1,000,000 hours in the IFCA Cloud computing cluster, with a storage of 6.15 TB per month.


Presentation in Spain of the Sixth Report and the Interactive Atlas


Beginning of September, a presentation session of the Sixth Report of the IPCC is scheduled at the national level, which will be coordinated by the Spanish Office for Climate Change (OECC) and will have the participation of national authors. The event will also be attended by representatives of the OECC and the State Meteorological Agency (AEMET), which will be supported by the CSIC within the framework of the PTI Clima activities. In addition, on September 27 the presentation of the final version of the Interactive Atlas is scheduled at an IPCC press conference to be held in Spain and which will be attended by the Third Vice President of the Government and Minister of Ecological Transition Teresa Ribera.


   

  • Joint Centre with the combined effort of Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and University of Cantabria (UC)

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    Cantabria, Spain

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