H2020 PRIMAVERA Project: Process-based Climate Simulation: Advances in High-Resolution Modeling and European Climate Risk Assessment

Climate is fundamental to our lives, from food, water, and health to transportation and the economy. Given the reality of climate change, it is critical to better understand global climate processes and how they affect our weather and climate, both in the past and in the future. The EU-funded PRIMAVERA project has developed some world-leading global climate models that, coupled with advanced analytics, tell us more about the processes that have driven changes in weather and climate over recent decades and how they might unfold in the future. Higher resolution optimizes risk management. “Our seven modeling groups developed new global models with higher resolution (think of the pixel size of a camera; our new models have pixels 25 km wide, while standard models have pixels over 100 km) that could show us more detail, so we could better represent the weather and climate in Europe and around the world,” explains Malcolm Roberts, PRIMAVERA project coordinator.

By better modeling both large scales, such as the mid-latitude jet stream, and smaller scales, such as tropical cyclones and extreme storms, it is possible to better quantify future climate risk to people and infrastructure. In addition to modeling, the team developed new tools to analyze the huge volumes of data they produced. This allowed them to observe specific weather and climate characteristics (e.g., blocking, when high pressure remains in one place and can cause heat waves in the summer or cold waves in the winter) and whether these might change in the future. These new tools help optimize public and private sector decision-making and increase climate risk management capacity. PRIMAVERA's Data Viewer visualization tool provides an excellent illustration of what can be achieved when model resolution is increased. New climate simulations improve information The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 7-Year Assessment Reports provide climate information from more than 40 international climate modeling groups.

However, due to the complexity and cost of running these models on large supercomputers, the spatial detail (resolution) is less than ideal, which can mean they fail to adequately represent some important weather and climate phenomena. PRIMAVERA addressed this by developing new climate simulation experiments that would be achievable with its significantly more expensive models and provide insights into what standard models might be missing. “In this way, we have managed to raise the bar for the quality of climate information and produced useful advice both in terms of policy and for some industry sectors, such as renewable energy, insurance, and energy networks,” says Roberts. How the reinsurance sector is benefiting The simulations provide new insights into improving climate models to produce more reliable projections of future changes. The project’s datasets (around 1.5 PB of data, equivalent to about 250,000 high-definition movies) are being used throughout the climate science community for research. The project team developed a catalog of windstorm events based on models that the reinsurance industry will use to assess risks due to storm damage.