ENSEMBLES – Ensembles-based Predictions of Climate Changes and their Impacts | Umweltbundesamt

Background and Goals

The project was to develop an ensemble-based forecast system for the development of the climate change and its effects, based on modern, highly-detailed global and regional Earth System Models. The modelling system is used for performing a quantitative assessment of climate change effects based on possible future climate scenarios. From this, policy-relevant information is to be provided. This method is intended to improve the reliability of the climate projections and quantify uncertainties.

The basic idea of the project is to create as many global and regional climate models for the same area, the same time periods and in the same resolutions as possible, in order to create a model ensemble. This method is intended to improve the reliability of the climate projections and quantify uncertainties.

Objectives: Several global and regional climate simulations for Europe and Africa that are available to users have been calculated and evaluated. The general objectives of the project were:

•  Develop an ensemble prediction system based on state-of-the-art, high resolution, global and regional Earth System models developed in Europe, all validated against quality controlled, high resolution gridded datasets for Europe. For the first time, a reliable, objective estimate of the range of the future climate changes will be possible.
•  Quantify and reduce uncertainties in the representation of physical, chemical, biological and human-related feedbacks in the Earth System.
•  Linking the model results to a range of application-specific studies in the sectors of agriculture, health, food, energy, water and insurance.

ENSEMBLES was divided into ten research themes with the following tasks:

•  Project management;
•  Development of the ensemble-based modelling system, combination of global and regional Earth System models into one multi-model system;
•  Implementation of the climate simulations with different global models;
•  Provision of regional climate models for two regions: a European region with resolutions of 25 x 25 km2 and 50 x 50 km2 for the period 1958-2002, and a region that includes a large part of Africa, for the period 1989-2005. For model validation, ERA-40 reanalysis data was used for the European region and ERA interim for the African region;
•  Development of the understanding of the processes governing climate variability and change climate predictability and the probability of extreme events. A further investigation area was the feedbacks in the climate system;
•  Development of high-resolution observational data sets with which the model simulations were compared. These are daily data sets available for 2 m-temperature and precipitation in the selected grid resolutions;
•  Assessments of impacts of climate change;
•  Development of emission scenarios and scenarios for land use change;
•  Development of an education program for communicating the ENSEMBLES research programme in the form of seminars, workshops, summer schools, scientific publications and courses for doctoral students.

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