European Climate Data Explorer an interactive tool for policy-makers

The European Climate Data Explorer (ECDE) is an interactive tool that provides access to climate impact data. The ECDE supports the European Green Deal, including the EU’s new strategy on adaptation to climate change. The interactive data visualisation provided by the ECDE makes accessing climate impact data easier for policymakers and other stakeholders. It helps by removing otherwise complex data processing hurdles to data discovery and exploration.

CEDA was funded by the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) to provide leadership and project management for the coordination and development of the ECDE. The ECDE provides novel interactive access to a diverse set of climate impact indices by combining live data from the C3S Climate Data Store (CDS) with visualisations that use the CDS Toolbox.

ECDE data is currently customised for climate indices in the health, agriculture, forestry, energy, tourism and coastal impact sectors. For example, the health sector has climate impact indices about thermal comfort and heatwaves as well as the suitability of Europe’s climate for the tiger mosquito which can transmit diseases, such as dengue fever.

Image: Screenshot from the European Climate Data Explorer, showing the six climate impact sectors addressed by the ECDE.

Each climate impact index has two ECDE pages: the first is a Europe-wide visualisation supported by text that provides context for how an index can be understood, the second allows users to explore an index further via an interactive map. The interactive map can be used to focus on smaller regions and to generate time series plots. The visualised data can be exported as images for use in reports and as data files for further analysis.

Image: Map of a climate impact index from the ECDE’s Forestry sector showing the projected change in the number of days per year with high fire danger under a high greenhouse gas emission scenario known as RCP8.5 for the period 2066-2095.

CEDA staff developed the editorial process for in-page documentation of climate impact indices which included a common information structure suited to the full range of ECDE indices. CEDA also provided the help resources for the ECDE.

The ECDE is hosted on Climate-ADAPT, a publicly accessible web portal managed by the European Environment Agency (EEA) in collaboration with the European Commission. 

Find out about other work we do in the CEDA Annual Report (20-21).