Department of Climate Services

Department philosophy / motto

Professional data management and services pertinent to weather and climate     

Scientific approach

Contemporary global and regional models in climatology are the main viable tool allowing producing climate projections: scenarios containing information on possible future Earth’s climate with respect to human activities. Yet, whilst the climate models are elaborated and complicated mathematical tools capturing the physical nature of major natural processes, they still suffer from our limited knowledge of many atmospheric processes and limits in numerical mathematics techniques. Similarly, observed data also suffer from a wide range of problems involving quality and locality representation issues.

In our department we analyze differences between climate model outputs and the real world. We study nature of found discrepancies, looking for their sources and finally for methods to alleviate them. Whilst the model development is the work for climate modelers in world climate centers, we develop statistical tools for correcting model biases in the specific area, for example the Czech Republic. In addition, we take special care to control quality of measured data coming from meteorological stations and other sources dealing with their errors.

In our work, we aim at methods, which are able to prepare model and observed data and make them suitable for climate change impact studies. This makes model outputs directly comparable with classical station records and we provide them to international community of climate change impact modelers from agriculture, forestry, hydrology and other sectors. We also guide other scientists on the safety and limits of the data use especially as the uncertainty of climate processes and our understanding of the climate as the whole.

Additionally we are also providing similar expertise on problems and uncertainties in the field of the applied meteorology. Fine example of our work is the reduction of error in forecasts of power production in renewable energy sector, where we are able to limit the costs of their operations on national level.

Key words:

Global and regional models, model validation, bias correction, data quality control and homogenization,  gridding,  climate and weather extremes, climate services, energy meteorology, weather forecasting, drought monitoring

Our services and outputs

•             Data quality control and time series homogenization of various meteorological elements including the development of new methods and software tools. Team members cooperate with partners from other countries to improve methods for climatological data processing and support selected data components/products available via Copernicus Climate Change Services.

•             Bias correction and processing of regional and global climate model outputs including their localization to positions needed by climate change impact modeling community together with a development of the related software tools.

•             Evaluation of performance of climate models with an emphasis on physical processes associated with extreme temperatures. This ultimately leads to selection of appropriate ensemble of climate model simulation for constructing climate change scenarios.

• Climate models analysis and their on-line presentation within Climate Change Atlas of the Czech Republic (www.klimatickazmena.cz).

• Development of meteorological components within the integrated climate services, e.g., a drought monitoring system (www.intersucho.cz).
• Research on connection between large-scale circulation and the incidence/severity of climate anomalies and extreme weather events in Europe.
• Development of model output statistics (MOS) methods and its application in the energy meteorology for the renewable power production, heating demand planning and power and gas consumption.
• Cooperation with the major power companies and utilities from the Czech energy sector (E.ON Energie, a.s., ČEPS, a.s., Amper Holding, a.s.) and their operational meteorological backup within the energy trading and power distribution.
• Advisory and scientific support for the agriculture sector in the Czech Republic.
• Public education related to the climate change issues.

Developed applications and tools:

• ProClimFC software and its earlier freeware components of ProClimDB and AnClim (www.climahom.eu) as a platform to share our methods with wide scientific community and contribution of users to its further improvement (by new stand-alone modules e.g. in R or Python, or improvement of current functions), both in academical sphere or outside.

• Renewable energy production forecasting models using the real measured data, numerical weather prediction forecasts and satellite data.

• Climate Change Atlas of the Czech Republic available on-line at www.klimatickazmena.cz

• Meteorological component of the drought monitoring and prediction system: www.intersucho.cz

• Web map application of the climate change impacts on Beskids region: https://gis.nlcsk.org/beskydy/