City-oriented Impacts of Regional Climate for Europe (CIRCE)
Extreme weather events are already affecting urban areas with sometimes severe impacts on people, infrastructure and socio-economic activities. Faced with these impacts, 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.
Project overview
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.
Methods and approach
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.
To the project website of CIRCE