14 December 2018 – As part of the European Commission’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), implemented by the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), Telespazio VEGA UK (a subsidiary of Telespazio, a 67/33% joint venture between Leonardo and Thales), has been awarded a €3m framework contract to evaluate the C3S Sectoral Information System, which provides user-oriented climate information to 10 sectors: Energy, Water Management, Agriculture & Forestry, Health, Transport, Coastal Areas, Tourism, Insurance, Infrastructure and Disaster Risk Reduction.
The C3S supports society by providing authoritative information about the past, present and future climate in Europe and the rest of the world. C3S users include scientists, consultants, planners and policy makers, the media and the public. This contract forms an integral part of the Evaluation and Quality Control (EQC) function for the C3S, which independently assesses the quality of C3S products and services to ensure that users have the information they need to support decision making, leading-edge science, or policy advice.
Telespazio VEGA UK will lead a team of European organisations that together comprise expertise of climate services across these 10 sectors. The contract will provide a mechanism to evaluate C3S sectoral-facing services and accept workflows into the Climate Data Store, and also maintain a database of all C3S user requirements and assess their feasibility and cost of implementation. Furthermore, a series of user consultations and workshops will take place around Europe with the various sectoral communities to gain direct feedback on existing C3S demonstrator applications, and also to obtain suggestions for potential service evolutions to address requirement gaps.
Marco Folino, CEO of Telespazio VEGA UK, said: “Climate change has become an important focus area for our business and we are delighted to be part of such an underpinning initiative to help ensure high quality service delivery from the Copernicus Climate Change Service across a diverse set of sectors.”
About Copernicus
Copernicus is the European Union’s flagship Earth observation programme. It delivers freely accessible operational data and information services which provide users with reliable and up-to-date information related to environmental issues.
C3S is implemented by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) on behalf of the European Union. ECMWF also implements the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS). ECMWF is an independent intergovernmental organisation, producing and disseminating numerical weather predictions to its 34 Member and Co-operating States.
More information on Copernicus: www.copernicus.eu
- The Copernicus Climate Change Service website can be found at https://climate.copernicus.eu
- The Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service website can be found at http://atmosphere.copernicus.eu
- The ECMWF website can be found at https://www.ecmwf.int