Abstract
European scale research is not limited to collaborative scientific advancements but also requires joint trans-national development and operationalization of the results. The X-RISK-CC project (https://www.alpine-space.eu/project/x-risk-cc/) brings together partners from five Alpine countries (Italy, Slovenia, Austria, Germany, France) in a joint effort to produce tangible impact in the support to climate risk managers and policymakers, motivated by the steadily increasing hazardous weather events that have been experienced in the Alps in recent decades. The accessibility of elaborated data and knowledge on current and future weather extremes is key to develop future risk scenarios and define effective risk management and climate change adaptation actions. To answer to this need and support climate-informed decision making, the X-RISK-CC webGIS was developed as an interactive and accessible way to visualize maps and NUTS 3 level aggregations of 20 specifically selected climate indices, including heavy rain, heatwaves, drought and compound processes, over the whole Alpine Space (AS). The indices are available over the historical period (1991-2020) and as projected changes under four different Global Warming Levels (GWLs), i.e., at +1.5°C, +2 °C, +3°C, and +4°C of global warming with respect to preindustrial conditions.
Historical fields are based on reanalysis data, specifically the CERRA reanalysis (Ridal et al. 2024) was used for calculating precipitation, temperature and wind related indices, while drought and heat-drought compound indices were derived from a downscaled version of ERA5 (Hersbach et al. 2020) developed within the ADO project (https://www.alpine-space.eu/project/ado/). A multi-model ensemble of EURO-CORDEX (Jacob et al. 2014) simulations was used to compute the projected changes of the indices in future GWLs. Climate indices were derived at annual and/or seasonal temporal aggregation and then aggregated over the periods corresponding to GWLs; multiple ensemble statistics (namely the 5th, 25th, 50th, 75th and 95th percentiles) were then calculated for each grid cell, index, GWL and annual/seasonal aggregation.
The webGIS is publicly available at https://cct.eurac.edu/x-risk-cc. As seen in Figure 1, given a climate index that is selected from the bar in the bottom of the page, the user is provided with multiple visualization options to switch from the historical period to a specific GWL projection, and to change the displayed information from annual to seasonal time aggregates. For GWL projections, the median of the ensembles is displayed by default, though the other precomputed ensemble statistics can be selected to explore the range of projected changes. When clicking on one of the NUTS 3 regions on the map, a pop-up window is shown (Figure 2) for an in-depth data visualization on that specific area and for the selected climate index and time scale, including i) a descriptive summary of the historical records for the region, ii) boxplots of the projected changes for each of the GWL, and iii) a chart of the yearly historical time series of spatially-aggregated values.
The webGIS is complemented by a “Digital Library” that includes in-depth technical documentation of climate data processing, and specific description and usage recommendations of the selected climate indices. The Digital Library also provides scientific syntheses and detailed reports of the analyses on past and future weather extremes conducted at Alpine Space level and in some representative pilot areas across the Alps.
All scientific geospatial information is available from the webGIS under a CC-BY 4.0 license, and can be downloaded directly from the web interface in different formats. All datasets are also available for bulk download through a single Zenodo repository (Lehner et al. 2025).
The research leading to these results has received funding from Interreg Alpine Space Program 2021-27 under the project number ASP0100101, “How to adapt to changing weather eXtremes and associated compound and cascading RISKs in the context of Climate Change” (X-RISK-CC).