Introduction

R3 represents a new and innovative approach to provide climate services at local scales in Norway. It will accomplish this through implementation of an integrated approach that aims to account for a range of possible outcomes and extensive interaction with stakeholders. Norway is characterized by large regional differences in geography and climate. An integrated modelling approach - one that can encompass a range of outcomes and represents detailed spatial structure and dynamics - is required to produce reliable climate change projections. Our approach addresses these requirements and also addresses the "usability gap" between climate information and decision-making. The need for improved, robust and credible estimates of local-scale climate change in decision-relevant contexts is pressing. We identify four challenges that currently hinder production of relevant, reliable and robust climate projections on local scales: a) Insufficient resolution in existing multi-model ensembles; b) Persistent biases in driving general circulation models; c) Dynamical approaches sample a small range of outcomes and under-represent uncertainty; and d) Lack of effective two-way communication between scientists and user communities often results in outputs/products do not match users' need for decision-relevant climate information.

R3 will make use of existing capabilities of the Norwegian Centre for Climate Services (NCCS) to develop a new framework for producing reliable climate change projections on local scales. We address the challenges described above through a number of actions, which culminate in an integrated modelling strategy for local scale climate projections. The added value of this approach will be evaluated, both from the stakeholders' perspective and in terms of scientific outcomes. The project's methodological innovations and scientific advances will benefit Norway and will provide a framework that will be generally transferable to other regions of the world.

Objectives

Primary Objective: Develop and implement innovative, integrated approaches to produce reliable local-scale climate projections for communities and stakeholders in Norway.

Secondary Objectives:

1. Continuous collaboration with users and stakeholders in the co-production of climate know-how; tailor the provision of climate information to their needs and opportunities in ways that are relevant to their organizational structures and cultures;

2. Extract and downscale robust climate change signals from global climate models in a way that mitigates systematic biases over the Northeast Atlantic region;

3. Integrate this with empirical-statistical downscaling to obtain temperature and precipitation statistics for local scales and expand the ensemble size to cover a range of outcomes;

4. Develop decision-relevant climate information in collaboration with project stakeholders;

5. Demonstrate the added-value of the integrated approach from both the stakeholder and scientific perspectives.