Copernicus interactive climate atlas: A game changer for policymakers

The new Copernicus Interactive Climate Atlas (C3S Atlas), developed by data management company Predictia and the Spanish Research Council (Cantabria Institute of Physics, IFCA) is an innovative web application that allows users to explore, analyse and visualise past and future climate change information using observational, reanalysis and climate change projection datasets that are available in the C3S Climate Data Store. 

The C3S Atlas is intuitive to use, offering the possibility to visualise and interpret key climate information from multiple lines of evidence - this explainer will help you get the most from it.

Access to quality-assured climate information

With the C3S Atlas, users will be able to conduct global and regional in-depth assessments of past trends and future changes in key variables and indices for different periods of time or for different policy-relevant global warming scenarios, such as the 1.5° or 2° thresholds stipulated in the Paris Agreement, for example, or for higher thresholds, if they wish.

Users can also customise products, such as maps or timeseries, to generate temporally or spatially aggregated values for seasons, periods and regions of interest. For example, they can select a specific European country, or define any polygonal region on the map for which they can generate and visualise data for analysis.

“We are excited about the possibilities that the Copernicus Interactive Climate Atlas offers. With its expanded scope, which is aligned with future C3S and IPCC requirements, and its intuitive, accessible interface, the C3S Atlas will give users access to quality-assured climate information encompassing 30 key variables and indices. This represents another important step towards the operationalisation of climate service in support of their growing role in informing the international climate adaptation and mitigation effort,” said C3S Director Carlo Buontempo.

The C3S Atlas expands on the functionalities, datasets and indices of the IPCC-IA to offer a comprehensive dataset with all the variables needed to get a clear picture of the current and future climate.

“The dissemination of the IPCC Interactive Atlas by the Copernicus Climate Change programme convincingly contributes to the original aims to bring climate change information in an accessible format to a wide crowd in every continent, not least in the areas where data availability or access to online resources is not trivial,” said Bart van den Hurk, author of the IPCC WG1 AR6 Atlas chapter where the IPCC-IA was developed and Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group 2, which assesses the vulnerability of socio-economic and natural systems to climate change, along with the consequences of climate change, and adaptation options.

“It allows a quick scan of a large range of monitoring and climate change features that sets the scene for further exploration, and support narratives that are needed to design actions that help mitigating or coping with climate change. It would be great to see an extension of the Interactive Atlas in the future to the impacts and adaptation domain of IPCC Working Group 2,” van den Hurk said.

Robert Vautard, Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group 1, which assesses the physical science of climate change, stressed that the interaction of science and society was at the heart of how we would react to the climate crisis. 

“The IPCC assesses the state of knowledge about climate evolution and needs to rely upon the most reliable data to inform the seventh assessment report and the options to respond to climate change. The Interactive Atlas of the IPCC will remain a major tool to achieve this goal and the present evolution of the Atlas provided by C3S sets the basis for future potential developments of the IPCC Atlas in AR7”,” he said.

Let’s get technical

So, how does the Copernicus Interactive Climate Atlas work? The gridded monthly dataset used for the Atlas integrates information from several climatic observational, reanalysis and projection datasets.1 The data is harmonised across the different datasets and catalogues to ensure standard common definitions and units for each of the variables.

One of the main innovations of the dataset is its inclusion of the CORDEX-CORE dataset, which provides regional climate projections covering the land components of the globe by combining two regional climate models and six general circulation models, which were selected to span the widest possible range of uncertainty. Due to its global continental coverage and higher resolution, this is a strategic dataset for the C3S Atlas, making it possible to analyse climate change in even higher resolution, such as for megacities around the world, for example.

In total, the dataset used in the C3S Atlas includes 30 variables and indices. In addition to the 21 climate variables and indices already included in the original IPCC Atlas gridded monthly dataset, it includes nine additional variables: monthly Standardised Precipitation-Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) for a six-month cumulation period, and monthly means for humidity, evaporation, soil moisture, total runoff, cloud cover, surface solar radiation, surface thermal radiation, and sea level pressure.

Quality assured data

C3S has carried out exhaustive quality control of the different variables and indices used in C3S Atlas to identify potential issues in the original data as well as during the workflow. Thanks to this procedure, it was possible to detect and fix issues in the original data and to identify problems and bugs during data harmonisation.

“This stringent quality control means that users can have confidence that the underlying model data is properly reflected in the C3S Atlas visuals,” said András Horányi, the scientist coordinating the C3S Atlas project on the Copernicus Climate Change Service side. “This data quality, combined with the wide scope of the datasets and the flexibility of the application, makes it an effective tool for use in numerous applications, from research to policymaking,” he said.