Challenges in retrieving and using climate services' data for local-scale impact studies: insights from the SCORE project

The demand for tailored climate data by different users is growing worldwide together with the awareness of the challenges posed to society and the environment by climate change. The extreme weather events intensification, sea-level rise, and coastal erosion are urgent challenges to be addressed by European coastal cities. The overreaching scope of the H2020 SCORE (Smart Control of the Climate Resilience in European Coastal Cities) project is to develop a framework for the definition and uptake of integrated Ecosystem-Based Approaches (EBA) and smart digital tools by establishing a network of 10 coastal city' living labs' (CCLLs) to increase the climate resilience of European coastal cities. To achieve this, the first steps are focused on i) the identification and selection of reference datasets for the historical baseline characterization and the projections for the next decades, ii) the downscaling of climate projections in order to produce a dataset of environmental parameters with the suitable temporal and spatial resolution for the project CCLLs' application needs, and iii) the development of statistical tools for data analysis, modeling and testing to assess the occurrence of major coastal hazards and the future evolution trends of the coastline. For this purpose, open, free, and reliable climate data are needed.