ICC-OBS tool

Freely available gridded observations on the small scale often do not represent the reality very well and general access to better data or additional station data is difficult or expensive. Local station data, that has the potential to improve the climate model data, is often available to local experts but cannot be distributed freely.

Therefore, BOKU-Met developed an easy to handle tool for “Improving bias-corrected Climate Change scenarios with local OBServational data” (ICC-OBS Tool). The tool allows the integration of additional local observations for further improvement of the climate change scenarios developed within the ClimaProof project on sub-regions (e.g. countries, river catchments, …), without having to share sensitive station data.

Features of the ICC-OBS-tool are:

  • Selection of the area of interest by latitude and longitude,

  • Integration of additional observational data (station data) to existing gridded observations (used for bias correction) to improve local observation quality,

  • Bias correction (Scaled Distribution Mapping) with improved observational data and saving the new bias-corrected data to a CF-conform netCDF file,

  • Automatic creation of plots for a quick look at the improved data

The ICC-OBS tool is provided to local experts free of charge. It can be downloaded via https://github.com/boku-met. The ICC-OBS Tool is programmed in Python and uses netCDF as its’ default output file format. As input for the tool climate model data (not bias-corrected) and gridded observational data on the same grid (available via the CCCA data server) as well as local station data are needed. Ideally station data should cover 30 years, but at least 10 years of daily data are recommended as input for the tool, covering the period 1981-2010.

A step-by-step instruction can be found in the User Guide under Training Materials.