Developing the ClimGen climate scenario generator for commercial application.

Future climate change will impact global business and public services and awareness and analysis of these possible changes allows organisations and companies to prepare, adapt and maintain market competition. Recent advances in climate science have enabled the provision of future climate information in terms of the daily character of future weather. Substantial quantities of climate information are available as a result of international research programmes (e.g. the Coupled Model Inter-comparison Project, CMIP5, for IPCC), although to many users, direct access to this data - especially in a way that adequately represents the full range of possible climate changes - is not feasible due to the specialist skills set required to obtain and process the raw data into a useable product. Existing efforts, on behalf of the user community in the UK, to redress this user-to-science gap have typically limited focus to the future climate of the UK and also been based on only a subset of scenarios.

UEA staff have developed a software tool (ClimGen) which enables users to quickly generate global climate scenarios, encompassing the full range of known uncertainties. This development has been achieved over the past 16 years through the support of numerous funders - including NERC. The software provides climate scenarios at each grid cell by combining the simulated change with observed climate. Currently, the scenarios are provided on a monthly time-scale for the future. This enables useful impact work, but we know that knowledge of the daily values of the climate fields (as well as mean monthly values) will greatly expand the utility of the software's output to the user community - for example by knowing the likely number of days where a temperature threshold is exceeded. We have already developed the software to provide plausible daily sequences of rain for each grid cell (important for water resource impacts and flood risk assessments) and would now like to incorporate the same capability for temperature and humidity, both of which are key variables for impact analyses in agriculture, health, water and energy sectors. Our Innovation Internship proposal seeks to embed a research scientist (who is also a ClimGen developer) within a weather-services company, Weatherquest Ltd, with a well-established route to market, to learn more about client needs within this field and to make modifications to the software to enhance commercial application. Weatherquest have a mature portfolio of existing clients in terms of weather services and knowledge of these existing user needs provides an excellent natural platform from which to explore deeper business interactions on longer climate (or decadal) timescales. A focus of the internship will be mutual training and knowledge exchange of the science techniques and processes (in respect of the Intern to the host) and the details of emerging user requirements (in respect of the host to the Intern).