The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) has released a new application, which demonstrates how close we may be to reaching a global warming of 1.5°C. The app also illustrates how developers can create innovative ways to exploit its free and accessible Climate Data Store.
According to C3S, which is implemented by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) on behalf of the European Commission, the new Global Temperature Trend Monitor is just one example of how the climate data Copernicus collects and processes can be transformed into a wide variety of applications for both business and society in general.
The free app allows anyone to put the current changes in global mean temperature trends in the context of the 1.5°C target limit set out in the Paris Agreement.
The application provides a sliding scale to explore temperature change compared to the pre-industrial period for any point between 2000 and today. A red line – showing the average warming rate over the past 30 years – is extended into the future until it reaches the 1.5° C limit. Updated on a monthly basis, the application provides a near real-time version of a graphic originally from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report, Global Warming of 1.5°C.
Scientists and tech specialists looking to develop apps like this can find a practical way for doing so, by either accessing and downloading the data to their own environments or by making use of the built-in toolbox, to create applications directly online.
Freja Vamborg, senior scientist at C3S, comments, “By making our data easy and free to access, external app developers are given the starting blocks to invent their own applications, whether for the general public or industries like energy and agriculture. Downstream applications which can harness Earth observation and climate data to help both industry and society will play an important role in helping us adapt to our changing planet.”
“To create the Global Temperature Trend Monitor, we utilize a single temperature estimate from the ERA5 dataset, making use of both the originally released 1979 to present data, as well as the recently released back-extension which extends the dataset back to 1950s. By using this dataset, we can easily update the app regularly and use it as an illustration or guide to see roughly which direction we are heading,” she adds.
All applications currently available in C3S’s Climate Data Store can be found here.