Understanding the interactions between climate and biosphere (including human perturbation) is fundamental to understand ongoing climate changes and identify the trajectories towards a sustainable development. To this aim we need to develop Earth System models able to fully close the biogeochemical cycles and the interactions and feedbacks between the geosphere and the biosphere. The activities are carried out through frontier research on understanding and modeling the Earth climate system, and towards the development of seamless Earth system predictions.
We contribute to several international projects such as EU-FP7 CLIMITS (http://tinyurl.com/fp7-iof-climits), EU-FP7 SPECS (http://www.specs-fp7.eu/), H2020 CRESCENDO (http://crescendoproject.eu), ECMWF Special project (SPITALES; http://www.ecmwf.int/en/research/special-projects/spitales-2016) and to the Pilot Application on the energy sector in the framework of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (http://climate.copernicus.eu).
Energy systems operations are strongly influenced by climate variables (e.g. temperature, wind, humidity) and an accurate forecasting is critical for the management of energy network and supplies. In collaboration to industrial partners (E.g. ENEL), we are leading international research and modeling to advance capability to predict future events related to energy operations.
We perform unprecedented development and understanding of the maximum skill that is attainable at the seasonal time-scale using the grand multi-model ensemble obtained by combining seasonal forecast systems independently developed by the European and Pacific-Asian communities.
By using latest developments in monitoring services, we use the emerging land data sets to derive novel set of observational constraints on land climate interactions and biophysical feedback. We use this improved understanding as an essential knowledge for the improvement of the modeling and of the prediction capability in the framework of the European Community Earth system model (EC-Earth).
The analysis of climate variability aimed to the study of feedbacks between atmosphere and other components of the Earth system is a major task facing the climate community. In this context, we are significantly contributing to improve understanding and quantification of interactions and feedbacks in the global climate system that could enhance our capability to predict and project climate variations.