ISIpedia - The idea of an open climate-impacts encyclopedia based on impact simulations generated within the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISIMIP)
ISIpedia aims to deliver national-level assessment reports, but with a global coverage, presenting information on the impacts of climate change on natural and human systems. They could cover bio-physical changes (such as changes in crop yields) as well as socio-economic consequences (such as changes in national GDP, poverty rates, migration, etc.).
ISIpedia will make use of the data and scientific knowledge generated within the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISIMIP, www.isimip.org) providing a consistent framework for geographically-resolved simulations of the impact of climate change on different sectors such as agriculture, hydrology, biomes, health, energy production and demand, etc. ISIMIP simulations are performed by various research teams across the globe, each of which works with its own impact model, but consistently follows the ISIMIP simulation protocol (i.e., all models use the same information about future changes in temperature and precipitation, but also socio-economic indicators such as population changes and economic development). The harmonization of the input data allow for a comparison of model simulations within the different sectors (e.g., crop yields provided by different crop models) but also for a combination of results across models from different sectors (e.g., to estimate the total damage induced by river floods (provided by the hydrological models) and and crop failure (estimated by the crop models).
The resulting large volume of simulation data are already freely available to the public via a dedicated node of the Earth System Grid Federation, ESGF. Through ISIpedia the central goal of ISIMIP
1. Provision of guided access to consistent climate impact simulation data,
will be complemented by the
2. Provision of access to national impact assessments
The assessments are intended to cover different "categories" including "future projections", "detection and attribution of historical changes", and "model evaluation". In this talk the idea of the portal will be illustrated by recent studies.
Katja Frieler holds a Diploma in Mathematics of the University of Bielefeld and a Ph.D. in “Physics of the Atmosphere” of the University of Potsdam. As Ph.D. student she worked at the Alfred-Wegener-Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI, Potsdam) on chemical modelling of polar stratospheric ozone losses. Before joining the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in July 2008 she was a Post-Doc at the Department of Biostatistics and Clinical Epidemiology, Charité, University Medicine Berlin.
She is deputy chair of Research Domain II on Climate Impacts and Vulnerabilities at PIK and head of the PRIMAP group. In addition she leads the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISIMIP). Her research is focused on the impacts of weather related extreme events on natural and human systems.