Summary
AdaPT program is designed to financially support the activities on the "Adaptation to Climate Change" in Portugal. Its development was guided by the terms set out on the Memorandum of Understanding between Portugal, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein, under the European Economic Area Financial Mechanism (EEA-Grants). Posteriorly the program was adjusted according to the needs and contributions of the coordination group of ENAAC (National Strategy for Adaptation to Climate Change).
Project areas were proposed aiming to contribute to increase the capacity to assess vulnerability to climate change and to raise awareness and education on climate change. Among them was a portal dedicated to climate change, Local Warming Website (LWW Portal). This portal has its main goal the increase of the capacity to assess vulnerability to climate change and to raise awareness and education on climate change in Portugal.
The portal provides several climatic indicators that quantify the occurrence and risk of different atmospheric events; such as, air temperature or wind on the surface, or indicators that result from complex algorithms that combine model variables to create new variables to address the needs of users as indices that measure the risk of events with impact significant potential, such as, droughts, rainstorms, heat and cold waves, fire risk, etc.
The basis of the construction of these indicators, provided in LWW, refer to observations and simulated projections of the current, past and future climate, from multiple combinations of CORDEX models (EURO-CORDEX program) and forcing general circulation models.
The LWW Portal is an access platform for the general public with dissemination functions of the results obtained in the project, namely:
- historical series;
- climate change at regional level;
- climatic indicators for specific sectors in Portugal.
Generically the portal allows users to access weather data, see the evolution of climatological resulting from numerical modelling of processes applied to the climate parameters for the selected area and/or time interval, provides data through a map service, performs data download operations and maps geoclimatic units, according to the user profile.