Regional Climate Regulation Capacities

Abstract

In the past decades climate change impacts have become more pronounced, especially in the European Alps. There has been a spatio-temporal diversity of these impacts ranging from east to west, north to south, and with consideration of the orography, from low to high altitudes. The impacts of the present weather conditions and climate change on the environment and on humans show a great variety. As a consequence of dissimilar preconditions, mid-term and short-term adaptation planning approaches cannot simply be transferred from one place to another. They require a local to regional understanding of the drivers, impacts and responses on vulnerable ecosystem services, and regional regulation capacities and adaptation potentials. With respect to climate variables this chapter explores existing climate data repositories and demonstrates how these can be transferred into standardised data offerings, enabling harmonised searching, discovering, assessing, analysing, and processing. Diverse publicly available meteorological datasets, from weather stations in the alpine space, are transferred into an Open Geospatial Consortium Compliant Sensor Observation Service. This standard compliant data repository enables a post-processing with Python scripts which analyses the unified data records and displays them in charts for further interpretation. As a result, readers are able to compile and publicly share standard compliant data repositories and run queries on them for data exploration to estimate impacts on ecosystem services.