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 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 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.”