URCLIM Flash News – April 2020

THE RESEARCH COMMUNITY REMAINS ACTIVE DURING THE LOCKDOWN

Due to the exceptional context the world is dealing with, the URCLIM team is still managing activities while teleworking since March 2020. Such activities cannot be put on hold since urban climate information provide core elements for public health policies.

As specified by the World Meteorological Organisation, the lockdown due to Covid-19 affects the provision of weather forecast, in terms of quantity and quality. In-situ means and atmospheric ones have been multiplied, completed by satellites data such as Copernicus’ Sentinel constellation.

In addition of the disturbance of daily forecasts, the lockdown also prevents climate and meteorology researchers and engineers to access their usual working environment.

Despite this context of remote working, the URCLIM team remains available and does its best to keep working on the different urban mapping strategies and selecting the best criteria to fill the need of cities in terms of climate services.

In this context, our thoughts go first towards those, women and men constituting the backbone of the task force against Covid-19 from all over Europe and above.

ABOUT

The URCLIM project is an EU-funded project composed of seven partners located in five European countries, from West to East. The goal of the project is to prove a concept: the realization of integrated Urban Climate Services (UCS) for urban planners and related stakeholders using open urban data and regional climate data.

In order to realize this objective, the project has 4 scientific objectives:

  • To develop a methodology for the creation of high-resolution maps of urban parameters for climate studies using user-generated data (like open-street-map) and authoritative data (like INSPIRE data and other official public data).
  • To analyse the propagation of uncertainty from regional climate models to urban scale climate models and local impact models. This part (and the next) will require high resolution climate modelling at typically 1km of resolution.
  • To evaluate multi-criteria impacts and various types of adaptation strategies, on the societal effects of heat waves, intense precipitation events and air pollution conditions in cities, in conjunction with urban climate. Considered impacts include physical aspects (e.g. Urban Heat Island Intensity, Floods), health impacts, and socio-economic impacts. Will be considered not only climate change but also urban development in terms of density, expanse, land use, and building qualities.
  • To define pertinent Urban Climate Services in cooperation with stakeholders, and using a visualization interface for scientists and urban stakeholders.

CONTACT

  • Valéry MASSON, URCLIM Coordinator – Météo France
  • Yasmina BEDDAR, URCLIM European project and communication manager – Météo France

Project URCLIM is part of ERA4CS, an ERA-NET initiated by JPI Climate
with co-funding of the European Union (Grant n°690462)