ROBINE-AT-Impact: Climate Impact Maps

These are the impact climate maps created in the project ROBINE - Regionsspezifische Impactuntersuchung von Klimawandel für eine robuste und integrale Energieinfrastruktur in Österreich. The climate impact maps were developed to visualise how climate change could affect Austria’s energy infrastructure. They are based on climatological hazard indicators and created for all four global warming levels (GWLs - GWL-1, GWL-2, GWL-3, GWL-4), enabling comparisons across scenarios.

Two case studies for critical infrastructure were carried out:

• Transmission grid (light metal overhead lines): assessed capacity reduction, using indicators such as average annual maximum temperature and average length of the longest consecutive period of desert days.

• Wind turbines: assessed potential limited wind production based on the average frequency of calm days, the average frequency of desert days, and the average frequency of storm days. 

The resulting maps reveal clear spatial patterns and show that impacts on infrastructure intensify with each warming level. While heat-related risks increase significantly, wind-related indicators change less. These maps represent the "translation" of climate indicators into energy-specific parameters in order to improve the applicability of climate indicators for the energy sector and to provide energy operators with additional, usable information.

These maps are publically available in higher resoltion and for download on Zenodo repository (below). The data used for the maps is available under https://zenodo.org/records/14697703 .

Funding Information: The project ROBINE is funded by the Climate and Energy Fund (KLI.EN) through the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) under project number FO999905716, as part of the Energy Research Call 2022 (Energieforschung 2022).