CARPATCLIM

The development of technologies, international co operations and environmental management require climatological databases covering large area. It causes problems especially in smaller countries, because the national (hydro)meteorological services have different measuring networks, instruments, data management tools and data quality control methods. These differences could lead to inhomogeneities in the climatological fields and they could bias the results.

The main aim of the project is to improve the basis of climate data in the Carpathian Region for applied regional climatological studies such as a Climate Atlas and/or drought monitoring, to investigate the fine temporal and spatial structure of the climate in the Carpathian Mountains and the Carpathian basin with unified methods. Therefore, a freely available, high resolution gridded database has been produced for the Larger Carpathian Region (LCR).

For this purpose, the project contains three modules with the objectives:

• Module 1: Improve the
  availability and accessibility of a homogeneous and spatially
  representative time series of climatological data for the LCR through data
  rescue, quality control, and data homogenization.
• Module 2: Ensure
  Carpathian countries data harmonization with special emphasis on
  across-country harmonization and production of gridded climatologies per
  country.
• Module 3: Develop a
  Climate Atlas as the basis for climate assessment and further applied
  climatological studies as well as for drought monitoring in the LCR in the
  frame of the European Drought Observatory.

Recognizing the need of a unified climate database in the LCR, the following boundary conditions have been detected:

• respect the
  existing national data policies
• have access to the
  most possible data
• exchange the
  minimum needed data
• using common
  software for data quality/homogenization and interpolation/gridding
• each country
  provides the same work