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Exeter Meeting 6th to 8th June

Minutes and Presentations from the RT6 Exeter Meeting are on the Meetings Page ANNUAL REPORTS: Please return partner reports and comments on 18 month 
plans to respective WP leaders for all RTs you are in as soon as possible. possible; details on reporting 

Please contact you financial administation NOW to allow time to start preparation of financial reports

8th July - some links for downscaling and JRC activities have been added to a WP6.3 page

RT6 is made up of three research workpackages WP6.1, WP6.2 and WP6.3 with WP6.0 covering the co-ordination of the RT.

RT6 seeks to answer a number of questions at the cutting edge of research into climate change impact assessment. There are three primary areas of effort:

WP6.1 The integration of process models of impacts on the natural and managed global environment into Earth System Models;

WP6.2 Linking impact models to probabilistic scenarios of climate change;

WP6.3 Maximizing skill in the impacts models driven by seasonal-to-decadal scale forecasting;

The ENSEMBLES impacts groups working in RT6 will build on the experience of past EU projects such as DEMETER, ATEAM, MICE and PRUDENCE. 
Indeed, most of the groups working in RT6 have been involved in one or more of these four projects. 

O6.a: To integrate process models of impacts on the natural and managed global environment into ENSEMBLES Earth System Models.

O6.b: To use impact models to describe system sensitivities to a plausible range of climate futures in terms of critical thresholds.

O6.c: To link impact models to ENSEMBLES probabilistic scenarios in order to develop risk-based estimates of the likelihood of exceeding critical thresholds of 
impact during the 21st century.

O6.d: To use impact models and new ENSEMBLES climate scenarios to improve understanding of the impacts of extremes.

O6.e: To drive impact models with ENSEMBLES ESM and RCM output in order to make probabilistic predictions on seasonal-to-decadal scale timescales 
at regional scales. 

• How should the technical issues for downscaling and bias correction be implemented in order to allow impact models to be successfully integrated within the EPS?
• Can the skill of the ensemble forecast be maximised within the application models through techniques such as ensemble dressing of the driving forecasts?
• What level of forecast skill is required for the impact model driving parameters from the ensemble forecast to allow a skilful impact model forecast?
• Can we quantitatively describe the sensitivities of exposure units such as agriculture, ecosystems and hydrology to future climate change in terms of thresholds?
• Can we estimate the probability of exceeding these thresholds?
• How can probabilistic scenarios of climate change be incorporated into impact analyses in order to generate probabilistic estimates of climate change impacts?
• Are the impacts of rare but very extreme events greater than the impacts of more frequent but less extreme events?
• This should be tested with respect to a range of impact sectors and activities.
• Are the combined biophysical and biogeochemical feedbacks within the EPS of equal magnitude to the geophysical effects over century and decadal timescales?
• This can be tested through feeding back land use change into offline model runs.