City-oriented impacts of regional climate for Europe

General Information

Extreme weather events are already affecting urban areas with sometimes severe impacts on people, infrastructure and socio-economic activities. Faced with these effects, which are expected to increase due to climate change, decision-makers need sound climate information on local urban issues in order to better plan the cities of tomorrow. Today, climate change impacts on urban areas are assessed by separate scientific communities, with some methodological limitations for each approach: Regional Climate Models (RCM) provide climate change information at the regional scale, but with a coarse horizontal resolution for cities and without specific surface parameterization for urban processes; most high-resolution impact studies focusing on urban issues (energy, thermal comfort) do not take into account urban-regional climate interactions and are city and indicator dependent. The CIRCE project aims to develop a more robust and generic methodology for assessing the impacts of climate change on European cities by (1) identifying innovative impact indicators that are relevant for local decision-makers and can be calculated from modelled and available city data and (2) clarifying the best current regional climate modelling configurations for urban impact studies. To this end, the new generation of high-resolution Convective-Permitting Models (CPM) will be used for the first time in a multi-city ensemble approach. Multi-sectoral indicators will be defined based on local climate risks (with a focus on heat waves and extreme precipitation) and urban issues related to various European cities. The ability of climate models to simulate specific extreme climate events and their impacts on cities will be assessed. Then, their future evolution will be analysed by combining the largest set of RCMs and CPMs currently available. The final objective will be to co-develop an urban climate service demonstrator based on these results and to feed into the CORDEX Flagship Pilot Study URB-RCC.
This is an individual Marie Skłodowska-Curie European Fellowship Grant for Dr. Benjamin Le Roy. Dr. Le Roy has a master degree in Physical Geography from the Grenoble Alpes University, and a Doctoral degree in Urban Climatology from the University of Toulouse III – Paul Sabatier, conducted at the Centre National de Recherches Météorologiques (CNRM, CNRS/Météo-France) in Toulouse. Last year he spent as Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University, New Jersey.

EU-Programme Acronym and Subprogramme Area	HORIZON-MSCA-2021-PF-01
Project Type	HORIZON MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowship - European Fellowship
Contract Number	Grant Agreement 101067769
Co-ordinator	Helmholtz-Zentrum hereon GmbH (DE)

Funding for the Project (€)	Funding for Hereon (€)
173,847	173,847

Contact Person at Hereon

Dr. Diana Rechid, Climate Service Center Germany (GERICS), (Phone +49 40 226 338 452) E-mail contact

Participants

Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon (DE)

Last Update: 05. July 2023