Through WP2 EU-CIRCLE has identified all climate-related parameters required for characterising climate hazards in order to assess their impact on critical infrastructures. This was achieved through the collation of a wide variety of sources and their associated tools. The major outcomes of WP2 include:

  • Overview and analysis of all existing climate databases;
  • Provision of information related to the the access policies of the databases;
  • Selection of the appropriate climate data processing tools based on the type of risk analysis study being undertaken (provided in Table 1);
  • Provision of information related to the metadata (e.g. type of files, format, names and units of variables) of impact and risk models.

 

     Table 1. Climate data processing tools

Climate processing tools
Climate Data Operators (CDO) CDO is set of command line instructions used to perform most common data manipulation operations on standard climate and NWP datasets.
NCAR Command Language (NCL) The NCAR Command Language, a product of the Computational & Information Systems Laboratory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and sponsored by the National Science Foundation, is a free interpreted language designed specifically for scientific data processing and visualization.
NetCDF Operator (NCO) NCO is set of command line instructions used to perform most common data manipulation operations on standard climate and NWP datasets.
ESD Tool ESD tool (‘esd’ package version 1.7009) is an R-package freely available by the Norwegian Meteorological Institute (MET Norway). R-package ‘esd’ facilitates data processing and more general analysis, as well as the implementation of empirical-statistical downscaling technique.
WRF Model Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model, a non-hydrostatic Mesoscale Model, for the application of dynamical downscaling technique.
Estimation of climate event likelihood
G-FMIS_FWI Tool G-FMIS_FWI tool estimates Fire Weather Index (FWI), Drought Code (DC) and Fine Fuel Moisture Code (FFMC), daily maps using the FWI Canadian System Equations.
Octave/MATLAB implementation of EVT Octave/MATLAB includes scripts for the return period estimation through Extreme value theory and climate extremes analysis.
R-programming implementation of EVT Estimation of the expected climate values for various return periods [20, 25, 50, 100, 500] and the probability of exceeding a value from time-series of climate values.
ESD Tool ESD tool (‘esd’ package version 1.7009) is an R-package freely available by the Norwegian Meteorological Institute (MET Norway) used to downscale the probability density function of indices and deduce the probability of exceedance of critical events.
Scenario selection tool A tool for the selection of various threat scenarios that that are likely to occur. The dates of these scenarios will be the reference point for CIRP analysis
Hazard Tools
CADDIES CADDIES was developed to provide fast simulations of flood scenarios at continental scales, uncertainty analysis, and near real time flood forecasting.
FIRETACTIC Fire propagation simulator used by fire-fighters in real time to plan the fire contour locations in the next hours.
Fire Emission Production Simulator (FEPS) (FEPS) is a user-friendly computer program designed for scientists and resource managers with some working knowledge of Microsoft Windows applications. The software manages data concerning consumption, emissions and heat release characteristics of prescribed burns and wildland fires.
G.FMIS G.FMIS is a Decision Support system consisting of a set of applications including a forest fire behaviour and propagation simulator.  G-FMIS simulates fire behaviour using Rothermel’s model and fire propagation using cellular automata techniques
HYSPLIT HYSPLIT has been used in forecasting the release of wildfire smoke.
Geospatial processing tools
CDO & GDAL-based re-gridding and re-projection scripts A combination of CDO (described in this document) and GDAL tools is used to (1) interpolate RCM output from original grid to regular lon-lat grid, and (2) remap and reformat the results of the previous step for the purpose of the GIS tools.
R-based re-projection, data format conversion and visualization tool R scripts are used to: (1) reproject RCM netcdf formatted output from spherical to regular lon-lat grid to a case-specific spatial domain, (2) check the results compared to CDO procedure, (3) export to GIS formats (asc, geotif …) or NetCDF.