The RESCCUE project from the FIC’s perspective

How is FIC contributing on the climate change research?

One of the principal research lines of the Foundation for Climate Research (FIC) to improve climate change simulations is the use of an exhaustive statistical downscaling method. It consists on the searching of physical and statistical relationships between local climate variables such as temperature or precipitation and large-scale predictors as pressure or geopotential heights. If this method is applied to global climate model outputs, local climate simulations for the future are obtained with an adequate accuracy range. The innovative part of FIC’s method for statistical downscaling is developed in two steps:

1. identifying past days with similar meteorological configurations to the day which we want to predict
2. searching of the physical-statistical relationships between variables restricted to the set of days obtained in the first step

These relationships are established through a multiple linear regression analysis in the case of temperature and estimating probability functions in the case of precipitation. The FIC method allows to better simulate the climate at the local level, and therefore is a very accurate approach to feed impact assessment models.         

What is the role of FIC in the RESCCUE project?

The main role of the FIC on the RESCCUE project is the generation of climate simulations and projections of extreme events in different time scales (season, year, decade and century). For this purpose, FIC leads the first Work Package (WP1), corresponding to the climate module of the project. In WP1, a previous identification of the historical climate hazards is carried out for the three pilot cities: Barcelona, Lisbon and Bristol. Therefore, the identified climate change drivers will be simulated for all time scales and will be provided to the RESCCUE team in order to feed the hazard and impact models. 

Why is the RESCCUE project different?

RESCCUE is different to other projects because seasonal and decadal climate change simulations have not been used in the context of urban resilience so far. These approaches allow us to analyse more accurately extreme events in terms of time resolution – when an extreme event is more likely to happen – and therefore anticipate both the events and their consequences.

What does it mean “multisectorial approach” and how does it work in the RESCCUE project?

Another of the advantages of RESCCUE is that a multisectorial approach is being used. This means that an interrelationship is established and developed between different urban services and infrastructures potentially affected by climate extreme events. Therefore, this approach allows a better estimation of the total impacts caused by the concatenated consequences of these interrelations. For example, a severe flooding could cause problems in the power supply, causing also problems in public transport.

Why does urban resilience matter and how does it affect our daily life?

Urban resilience is a key factor to take into account in the future as climate change can put at risk the performance of our urban services and our infrastructures. It affects our daily life because extreme events such as droughts, heat waves or floods have a direct impact on day-to-day aspects of urban life like water and energy supplies or public transport.