How to Build Integrated Climate Change Enabled EDSS

Results from global and regional climate scenario modelling predict significant changes in temperature and precipitation during the rest of the century. Episodes with extremely high temperatures and more intense rainfall will occur more often. Climate change will affect the urban environment and should be taken into account in long term and sustainable urban planning for adaptation to the new climate conditions. To consider the effects of climate change in today’s planning, tools are needed to support the development of climate change enabled applications. These tools have to support several aspects of application development in the context of EDSS: a) How can the results from climate change models be integrated in today’s applications? b) How to access climate change information? c) How to compare local effects of climate change scenarios? d) How to gain access to downscaling functionality required for local problems? e) How to feed local models with climate scenario data. Or in other words: How to build climate change enabled applications.

Within the FP7 project SUDPLAN, which integrates environmental modelling and software expertise, a system of standardised services and end user applications has been developed. The system delivers long term projections of environmental data for different aspects of local modelling (air quality, hydrological conditions and intense rainfall) based on different climate scenarios. The services are interactive and require input of local observations to improve downscaled projections. This is necessary to support wide applicability as the resolution requirements of local models can be very different. All services are provided through standardized service interfaces. On top of these services, the so-called Scenario Management System (SMS) provides end user components for scenario management, visualisation, model integration as well as wizards to support the relevant workflows and the interaction with common downscaling services. The SMS is based on the geo-spatial application suite CIDS which allows to build decision support systems (DSS) with a focus on using climate change projections in the workflow.