SPECS third General Assembly

The agenda includes both plenary and parallel breakout group (BOG) sessions.

  • 22 October: Joint session SPECS-EUPORIAS
    • 8:30 Registration
    • 9:00-9:05 Welcome by the Scientific Deputy Director of Research at Météo-France, Dr. Philippe Dandin.
    • 9:05-9:15 ECOMS intro (C. Hewitt, Met Office)
    • 9:15-9:35 SPECS summary (F.J. Doblas-Reyes, IC3)
    • 9:35-9:55 EUPORIAS summary (C. Buontempo, Met Office)
    • 10:00-10:30 Coffee break
    • 10:30-11:00 Guest stakeholder to discuss user needs (A. Graça, Research & Development at Sogrape Vinhos, Porto Area, Portugal)
    • 11:00-13:00 Parallel workshops, encouraging partners to ensure cross-project attendance; the organisers are expected to produce a two-page summary of the workshops two weeks after the General Assembly
      • Reconciling current and future scientific capability with climate and climate impact information user needs at the seasonal to inter-annual timescale in Europe: Do you know what type of climate and climate impact products and services are available in Europe at the seasonal to inter-annual timescale? Have you tailored, customised or bias-corrected climate and climate impact data? Are you developing the next generation of climate and climate impact models? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then we want you at our workshop to help us assess the feasibility of fulfilling the user needs identified in the EUPORIAS project. Your knowledge, insight and participation are critical to the success of this workshop. We expect the workshop to identify what user needs are currently fulfilled with existing products and services; which ones need more tailoring of existing data/information; which ones need more/new research; and which ones are not feasible to deliver in the next 15 years (e.g., due to limits to predictability or computing power).
      • Second SPECS verification workshop: This workshop will demonstrate the recently developed R packages SpecsVerification and S2dverification. Users should bring their computers to try out the new routines live, which will be downloaded from the repository and tested on simple case studies to illustrate their potential.
    • 13:00-14:00 Lunch
    • 14:00-16:00 Cross-project BOGs (e.g. data, uncertainty, user needs), coffee available outside of the meeting rooms (chairs and rapporteurs subject to confirmation)
      • UDG and BADC interfaces to model output (Antonio Cofiño chair, Pierre-Antoine Bretonnière rapporteur)
      • Communication of confidence (Andrea Taylor chair, Ed Hawkins rapporteur)
      • What can be learnt from a series of very specific user’ needs? (Marta Bruno Soares chair, Wolfgang Müller rapporteur): There is not such a thing as "stakeholders' needs". Rather there is a multitude of needs from very different and specific stakeholders. The process of extracting users' needs must start from this very low level and, where and when possible, generalise it in order to identify common needs. Starting the conversation from the general often results in a set of requirements that are too generic to be useful. This discussion will focus on how to feedback users' needs into the research agenda.
    • 16:00-16:30 Plenary: summary of the discussion, a couple of slides summary of each BOG
    • 16:30-18:30 SPECS general issues (I)
      • Project Office update
      • ECOMS newsletter
      • data repositories (consult the Project Office update presentation)
      • milestones and deliverables (consult the Project Office update presentation)
      • fact sheets
      • technical notes
      • glossary
      • multi-model scientific papers using the SPECS experiments (each paper lead to briefly provide an update, including deadlines)
      • WCRP Grand Challenge on Regional Climate Information
      • meetings: SPECS/MiKlip decadal prediction workshop
    • 20:00 Meeting dinner
  • 23 October
    • 8:30 Registration
    • 9:00-10:30 BOGs with several WPs
      • Room 1: Predictability and processes WP2.2, WP4.2, WP4.3, WP4.4, WP5.1 (Chair: Tim Stockdale, Rapporteur: Eric Guilyardi)
      • Room 2: Verification, initialisation, stochastic processes and resolution WP2.1, WP3.1, WP3.2, WP4.1 (Chair: Michel Déqué, Rapporteur: David Stephenson)
      • Room 3: Climate information and climate services WP5.2, WP5.3, WP6.1, WP6.2 (Chair: Matteo De Felice, Rapporteur: Caio Coelho)
    • 10:30-11:00 Coffee break
    • 11:00-12:30 BOGs with several WPs, specifically addressing the three CCTs
    • 12:30-13:30 Lunch
    • 13:30-14:00 SPECS general issues (II)
    • 14:00-16:00 Plenary: scientific presentations (20 mins each including discussion)
      • Data quality control and archiving, ESGF publication, and applying ESMVal to SPECS data (M. Juckes, P.A. Bretonnière)
      • MiKlip and the standardized evaluation system for climate modelling (C. Kadow)
      • Downscaling methods for daily precipitation statistics (R. Benestad)
      • Predictability due to initial soil moisture (C. Ardilouze)
      • North American Multi-Model Ensemble (B. Merryfield)
      • Update on the decadal initiative for CMIP6 through the Decadal Climate Prediction Project (DCPP-MIP) and its extension at the French national level through the MORDICUS project (C. Cassou)
    • 16:00-16:30 Coffee break
    • 16:30-18:30 Plenary: scientific presentations (20 mins each including discussion)
      • Arctic variability and predictability on seasonal to decadal timescales (E. Hawkins)
      • Analysis of the predictions of the Arctic sea-ice extremes in several forecasting systems (N.S. Fuckar)
      • Do seasonal to decadal climate predictions underestimate the predictability of the real world? (D. Smith)
      • Impact of hindcast length on estimates of seasonal climate predictability (A. Weisheimer)
      • A Bayesian approach to forecast verification, using a signal-plus-noise framework for ensemble forecasts (S. Siegert)
  • 24 October
    • 8:30-9:45 Plenary: presentation of the main conclusions of the BOGs
    • 9:45-10:30 Plenary: presentation of the progress with the CCTs
    • 10:30-11:00 Coffee break
    • 11:00-13:00 Plenary presentations for each WP (15 mins per WP including questions)
      • David Stephenson (UNEXE)
      • Eric Guilyardi (CNRS)
      • Michel Dequé (Météo-France)
      • Johanna Baehr (UHAM) and Mihaela Caian (SMHI)
      • Klaus Wyser (SMHI)
      • Bart van den Hurk (KNMI)
      • Tim Stockdale (ECMWF)
      • Antje Weisheimer (UOXF)
      • Emma Suckling (UREAD) and Jonathan Eden (KNMI)
      • José Manuel Gutiérrez (CSIC)
      • Caio Coelho (INPE)
      • Matteo de Felice (ENEA)
      • Doug Smith (MetOffice)
    • 13:00-14:00 Lunch
    • 14:00-15:00 Plenary presentations for each WP (15 mins per WP including questions)
    • 15:00-15:30 Final discussion
      • IPR aspects
    • 15:30 Adjourn