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QA4Seas (Quality
Assurance for Multi-model Seasonal Forecast Products) aims
at developing a strategy for the evaluation and quality
control (EQC) of the multi-model seasonal forecasts
provided by the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) to
respond to the needs identified among a wide range of
stakeholders.
The EQC function assesses the technical and scientific quality of the service including the value to the users. It has a critical role in the C3S in ensuring that the service meets the needs of a range of sectoral users for high-quality information. The EQC will ensure that the information from the Climate Data Store (CDS) is fully traceable, adequately documented and that sufficient attention has been given to the assessment of uncertainties. The EQC will conduct activities to monitor the technical service performance using standard key performance indicators (e.g. timeliness, data access and availability, etc.) as well as the scientific quality of the delivered products. The EQC function will design routine reporting procedures to inform both ECMWF and the Commission about the outcome of its investigations and propose appropriate ways to improve the service.
The quality assessment will be user driven and will put at work the best expertise available on the evaluation of the multi-faceted quality aspects of state-of-the-art seasonal forecast systems. A thorough survey will be undertaken and analysed to provide a detailed mapping of the user needs, identifying those features that should be addressed with priority. The survey will be fed with general information about the data available and the concepts that form the basis of seasonal forecasting, including illustrations from a preliminary quality assessment.
The challenge of the quality assessment of the C3S for the multi-model seasonal forecasts is fourfold:
The QA4Seas outcome will be used to identify a set of the requirements for the CDS to address the main user requirements, to perform a gap analysis of the current information available to users and to develop a prototype of the EQC system that will illustrate the strategy proposed for the future development of the C3S.
The EQC function assesses the technical and scientific quality of the service including the value to the users. It has a critical role in the C3S in ensuring that the service meets the needs of a range of sectoral users for high-quality information. The EQC will ensure that the information from the Climate Data Store (CDS) is fully traceable, adequately documented and that sufficient attention has been given to the assessment of uncertainties. The EQC will conduct activities to monitor the technical service performance using standard key performance indicators (e.g. timeliness, data access and availability, etc.) as well as the scientific quality of the delivered products. The EQC function will design routine reporting procedures to inform both ECMWF and the Commission about the outcome of its investigations and propose appropriate ways to improve the service.
The quality assessment will be user driven and will put at work the best expertise available on the evaluation of the multi-faceted quality aspects of state-of-the-art seasonal forecast systems. A thorough survey will be undertaken and analysed to provide a detailed mapping of the user needs, identifying those features that should be addressed with priority. The survey will be fed with general information about the data available and the concepts that form the basis of seasonal forecasting, including illustrations from a preliminary quality assessment.
The challenge of the quality assessment of the C3S for the multi-model seasonal forecasts is fourfold:
Addressing adaptationIt must provide information for climate services and short-term adaptation together, because different users approach climate information differently and many of them are already familiar with the climate-change problem |
Providing consistencyIt must provide information on which level of trust can be built, requiring a high degree of coherence across products, underlying data sets, processing methods, uncertainty communication, training and guidance, etc. |
Providing innovationIt should make operational recent developments from research, with innovative knowledge, methods and technologies to answer real-world issues, with stringent requirements in terms of standards and quality control |
Addressing efficiencyThe EQC information should be timely (e.g. available to respond to users’ queries with a delay as short as possible), an aspect that imposes certain restrictions on the approaches and algorithms considered to produce it |
The QA4Seas outcome will be used to identify a set of the requirements for the CDS to address the main user requirements, to perform a gap analysis of the current information available to users and to develop a prototype of the EQC system that will illustrate the strategy proposed for the future development of the C3S.
The QA4Seas team
The QA4Seas project is lead by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.
Contact Dorota Chmielewska for more information.
Other partners:
- MeteoSwiss, Switzerland
- Predictia, Spain
- University of Leeds, UK
- University of Exeter, UK
- Instituto de Física de Cantabria - CSIC, Spain