Reading: University’s IEA involved in securing funding for new climate projects

The Institute for Environmental Analytics (IEA) at the University of Reading is celebrating a hat-trick of funding wins which will boost commercial use of climate data in the UK. It is to be a partner in three new climate projects which have won funding from ECMWF’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S).

The first collaborative project, for which funding to a total of €1.6 million has been secured, is for a Wind Storm Climate Service (WISC). This collaborative project will address the increasing social and economic cost of severe wind storms. It is aimed at decision-makers in the insurance sector and will also be of benefit to areas such as energy, transport and civil engineering.  

The 27-month project will be led by information technology company CGI. As well as the IEA and University of Reading, partners include Telespazio Vega UK, Met Office, KNMI (Dutch Met Office), IVM (Amsterdam), OASIS and Swiss Re.

The project will use cost-effective open-source tools and data sources, and it will combine historical data on wind storms from across Europe with projections of the effect of climate change. The results will be presented in a way that can be used to improve services such as risk modelling. 

The second project, which has been awarded a total of €1.5m, is AgriCLASS. It will focus on so-called 'woody crops' including olives and vines. Growers around the world will benefit from the project’s high-quality climate data which should help them to adapt their farming methods to weather changes. Rather than just giving end users the climate data, the IEA’s role will be to develop metadata links and design accessible visualisations in order to make the resulting information more accessible.

This project will be led by Telespazio Vega UK Ltd. Fellow partners with the University of Reading and IEA are the Met Office, University of Molise in Italy, CGI, Telespazio France and eGeos. 

The final, 27-month project is European Climatic Energy Mixes (ECEM). This will produce, in close consultation with prospective users, a climate service tool which will enable the energy industry and policy makers to assess how well different energy supply mixes in Europe will meet demand over different time horizons - from years to decades.  It will take account of how changes in climate affect the supply of renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar, and also affect the demand for energy. 

The project will be led by the University of East Anglia. Partners alongside the IEA and University of Reading are Electricité De France (EDF, France), the Met Office, ARMINES (France), and ENEA (the Italian agency for new technologies, energy and sustainable development). The IEA will develop the proof-of-concept demonstrator.

Colin McKinnon, IEA CEO, welcomed news of the successful bids: “These projects will prove to be good examples of the IEA being able to bring together scientific knowledge with advanced data analytics to provide decision-support tools for organisations in a range of sectors facing environmental challenges."