One of the objectives of the HIGHLANDER project is to generate, by using High Performance Computing, new climate datasets that support a better and more sustainable management of natural resources and the territory, thus helping to reduce the risks associated with climate change.
During the first phase of the project, two relevant datasets were produced by CMCC Foundation and ECMWF relying on Cineca GALILEO supercomputer.
These datasets are based on reanalysis, a retrospective analysis technique used to provide data on territorial grid of different dimensions starting from the historical data of in situ observations.
The typical use of such a dataset is research and downstream services, like calculation of indicators and indices, as well as feeding impact models, to serve decision support systems concerning several land components.
The VHR-REA_IT dataset, released by CMCC, were produced by dynamically downscaling the ERA5 reanalysis over Italy through the COSMO Regional Climate Model (RCM). ERA5 is the fifth generation ECMWF atmospheric reanalysis of the global climate covering the period from January 1950 to the present.
Produced by the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) at ECMWF, ERA5 provides hourly estimates of many atmospheric, land and oceanic climate variables. The native ERA5 resolution was originally available at a horizontal resolution of ≃31 km. VHR-REA_IT, the new dataset by CMCC, improved the resolution to ≃ 2.2 km over the whole Italian territory and provides now a very detailed (in terms of space–time resolution) and comprehensive (in terms of meteorological fields) dataset of climatological data for at least the last 30 years (01/1989-12/2020). The model run was conducted on the GALILEO supercomputer using 60 nodes, corresponding to 2160 cores, and employed about 61 hours to simulate 1 year. The simulation produced ≃ 8 TB of outputs.
The VHR-REA_IT dataset, along with the one realised by ECMWF and that we are going to present you in a next news, will be used by the other partners (Arpae, FEM, Arpap, CIA) for the implementation of various Downstream Applications and (pre-)Operational Services (indicated with the acronym DApOS). The design and development of the DApOS are already underway and we are looking forward to integrating them in the Highlander portal that has been developed by Cineca.
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