CIRCE - Climate Change and Impact Research: The Mediterranean Environment

CIRCE aims at developing for the first time an assessment of the climate change impacts in the Mediterranean area. The objectives of the project are: * To predict and to quantify physical impacts of climate change in the Mediterranean area * To evaluate the consequences of climate change for the society and the economy of the populations located in the Mediterranean area * To develop an integrated approach to understand combined effects of climate change * To identify adaptation and mitigation strategies in collaboration with regional stakeholders CIRCE wants to understand and to explain how climate will change in the Mediterranean area. The project will investigate how global and Mediterranean climates interact, how the radiative properties of the atmosphere and the radiative fluxes vary, the interaction between cloudiness and aerosol, the modifications in the water cycle. Recent observed modifications in the climate variables and detected trends will be compared. The economic and social consequences of climate change shall be evaluated by analysing direct impacts on migration, tourism and energy markets together with indirect impacts on the economic system. CIRCE will moreover investigate the consequences on agriculture, forests and ecosystems, human health and air quality. The variability of extreme events in the future scenario and their impacts will be assessed. A rigorous common framework, including a set of quantitative indicators developed specifically for the Mediterranean environment will be developed and used in collaboration with regional stakeholders. The results will be incorporated in a decision support system tool and disseminated to the relevant users. Possible adaptation and mitigation strategies will be identified. The integrated results discussed by the project CIRCE will be presented in the first Regional Assessment of Climate Change in the Mediterranean area. BOKU contributes to the Research Line 4 in CIRCE. The scientific objectives of RL4 are: 1. To determine how the Mediterranean System works, including its response to internal perturbations, 2. To establish how the perturbations propagate through the global system and back, i.e., how the Mediterranean system responds to external inputs. This RL4 is focused on the investigation of the meteorological processes, scale interactions and feedbacks mechanisms linked to climate change in the Mediterranean basin. The determination of the main circulation modes of the atmospheric pathways, and its seasonal variability in the Mediterranean basin, is a relevant issue to integrate feedbacks driving climate change in terms of precipitation regimes, secondary pollutants production, ventilation conditions, etc. This characterisation of the atmospheric flow regimes, its seasonality and statistical significance allows the assessment of the representativity of selected case studies to evaluate the impact of air quality on climate, as it will be done in RL8, and, besides, feedbacks between the different components involved in the climate change within the Mediterranean environment (water vapor budget, import-export pollutant pathways in the Mediterranean, land-use change), topics that are developed in this RL4. Both approaches will be closely connected through bilateral exchanges between the involved groups.