Interview with Stijn Vermoote
Stijn Vermoote is Research Programme Officer at the Research Executive Agency of the European Commission. He is responsible for the coordination of calls for proposals and the linked evaluation process and the management of a set of FP7 and H2020 research projects in the domain of the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring services and Copernicus Climate Change services.
How does ERA-CLIM2 contribute to Copernicus?
In 2013, the European Commission defined a series of topics within its FP7 Space Programme to set up preparatory activities to support the Copernicus (GMES at that time) climate change services. These topics reflected the priorities identified during the GMES stakeholder consultations and the Helsinki Climate Service conference in 2011.
One of the key priorities highlighted was the need for research on a 20th Century reanalysis at a global level and to considerably enhance the description of interactions between different components of the Earth-system such as atmosphere, land, ocean, cryosphere and carbon cycle. Building upon the experience gained in ERA-CLIM and other reanalysis initiatives, the ERA-CLIM2 consortium, under the lead of ECMWF, presented an ambitious project which now serves as a preparatory activity for the global climate reanalysis element of the Copernicus climate change services.
Which were the other preparatory activities for the Copernicus climate change services and how do they connect to ERA-CLIM2?
The FP7 Space Work Programme 2013 aimed to encompass most of the mandatory actions to ensure that the Copernicus climate change services will benefit from state-of-the-art data, tools and techniques. This will generate the relevant set of climate variables, indicators and indices required to analyse, monitor and predict the patterns of both the climate drivers and climate impacts.
Besides ERA-CLIM2, four other projects have been selected.
- UERRA focuses on the development of an ensemble system of regional reanalyses, based on experience gained in EURO4M.
- QA4ECV focuses on the development of a traceable quality assurance system for multi-decadal ECVs.
- CLIPC has the objective of providing access to simulated and observed climate datasets and the development of climate indicator toolbox.
- EUCLEIA aims to provide information on how likely high-impact environmental disasters are attributable to natural climate variability or human-induced effects.
All projects started early 2014 and will run for 36 months, except for UERRA which will run for 48 months. Interaction between these five projects is guaranteed via a dedicated overarching coordination and by having partners involved in several of these projects.
How does the planning of ERA-CLIM2 relate to the start of the operational Copernicus services?
As you know, the delegation agreement between the European Commission and ECMWF has recently been signed for the coordination of the Copernicus climate change services. It initiates a challenging new era in which climate change services will need to be set up in an operational mode. The first two years are foreseen as an initial pre-operational phase in which activities will primarily focus on building infrastructure, mapping user requirements and developing proof-of-concept services for the various application sectors. As indicated earlier, the FP7 projects, including ERA-CLIM2, will serve as an important input and will run in parallel with this pre-operational phase.
ERA-CLIM2 and the other projects will need to think beyond the end of their project to plan and prepare for a potential uptake of some mature project activities into a long-lasting operational mode.