CliPick - CLIMATE CHANGE WEB PICKER - Bridging climate and biological modelling scientific communities
The publication to refer Clipick is available here and can be cited as Palma JHN (2017) CliPick - Climate change web picker. A tool bridging daily climate needs in process based modelling in forestry and agriculture, Forest Systems 26(1), eRC01, 4 pages
This tool tries to bridge the communication between climate scientists and end users of the data.
The research behind the idea of this tool was forest process based modelling trying to assess climate change impacts. Soon became challenging when there was a needed to communicate with climate researchers in order to use climate data with climate change predictions. Soon was understood that NETCDF is the most common file format to exchange data between climatologists.
The application here presented focus on the access of NETCDF files which are in binary format and are used to store gridded data. The term "Big File" has, of course, different definitions depending on the fields of research. 500 megabytes may be a "trivial size" for a climate researcher but it is already a considerable size for a forest growth modeller to deal with. Although the amount of information is of importance for climatologists due to the complex physical occurrences in the atmosphere, only a few layers of data are relevant for specific models needing climate data.
Furthermore, text files (ASCII) are the most used in forest growth modelling. They provide instant human readable information, which is often needed during any model development and projection phase, not only for researchers but also for educational purposes. The main goal was to produce these files from NETCDF sources
While programming under different languages, I gathered Python, JavaScript and PHP, HTML, CSS and AJAX, in order to build a platform that could intuitively supply data in ASCII format, depending on the user needs.
The application uses datasets from the project www.ensembles-eu.org and http://cordex.org/, in particular the regional model dataset from Hadley Center, scenario A1B, with normal sensitivity 3Q0, usually abbreviated by HadRM3Q0_A1B and the KNMI RACMO22E model from the EC-EARTH consortium in the CORDEX Experiment. The selection of the model from the Hadley Center was based on the work by Soares et. al (2011) that showed the best fit for the portuguese context. The climate change scenario A1B and 3Q0 are considered to be of medium sensitivity representing climate change in a moderate behaviour. As for CMIP5, Clipick is using simulations from the Regional Atmospheric Climate Model (RACMO) simulated by the Koninklijk Nederlands Meteorologisch Instituut (KNMI) RACMO model, showing a remarkable quality on the representation of European precipitation (Katragkou et al., 2015; Kotlarski et al., 2014; Prein et al., 2015)