CLIPC is a portal to provide a single point of access for scientific information on climate change. This is made possible through the Copernicus Earth Observation Programme for Europe, which will deliver a new generation of environmental data.
CLIPC provides access to climate information of direct relevance to a wide variety of users, catering for consultant advisers, policy makers, private sector decision makers and scientists, but also interested members of the general public. This “one-stop-shop” platform allows you to find answers to questions related to climate and climate change impact.
CLIPC information includes data from satellite and in-situ observations, climate models, data re-analyses, and transformed data products enabling impact assessments and assessment of climate change impact indicators. CLIPC complements existing services such as GMES/Copernicus pre-operational components, but focuses on datasets providing information on climate variability, on decadal to centennial time scales from observed and projected climate change impacts in Europe. With that, guidance information on the quality and limitations of all data products is provided.
Furthermore, CLIPC provides a toolbox to generate, compare, manipulate and combine indicators. Expanding climate data volumes are and will be supported with a distributed scalable system, based on international standards. An on-going user consultation process will feed back into all the products developed for some time into the future. Part of the toolbox is integrated with Climate-ADAPT.
A number of use cases has been developed to demonstrate how the functionalities of the CLIPC Impacts Indicator Toolbox can be used to identify, select, compare, combine and rank indicators, for applications in research or decision-support support in policy and practice situations.
CLIPC ensures that the provenance of science and policy relevant data products is well-documented. Clarity of provenance is supported by providing access to intermediate data products. Documentation includes information on the technical quality of data, on metrics related to scientific quality, and on uncertainties in and limitations of the data.
The CLIPC consortium was funded by the European Union’s Seventh framework programme (FP7) and brings together the key institutions in Europe working on developing and making available datasets on climate observations and modelling, and on impact analysis. CLIPC works closely with four concurrent FP7 projects developing pre-operational Copernicus Climate Change services for global re-analyses (ERA-CLIM2, UERRA, QA4ECV and EUCLEIA).
