PRIMAVERA

Many of the most pressing questions about regional climate change urgently require advances in process simulation. For example, to what extent are recent heat waves, floods and droughts in Europe attributable to natural variability or human influences on the global climate system? How will the risk of such high impact events change over the next few decades and beyond?

The extent to which it is possible to provide robust answers to these questions relies fundamentally on the fidelity of the climate models that are used to address them. However, fidelity is insufficient in itself: we must be able to justify why a particular model produces a particular prediction at the process level.

Many years of experience, first in numerical weather prediction and, equally albeit only recently, in climate simulation, have demonstrated that advances in the explicit simulation of key processes are essential to achieving sustained progress and to provide robust answers. High-resolution has been identified as one essential element of the development of GCMs to reproduce key climate processes with higher fidelity than conventional GCMs, thus enabling detailed process understanding.

PRIMAVERA is a European Union Horizon2020 project that aims to develop a new generation of advanced and well-evaluated high-resolution global climate models, capable of simulating and predicting regional climate with unprecedented fidelity, for the benefit of governments, business and society in general. 

Image: EC-Earth Global Climate Model 
http://ecearth.knmi.nl/Visualization/Hurricane_win…

Project website: https://www.primavera-h2020.eu/

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement no. 641727.