The Collection of Open Sources for Climate Physical Risk Analysis
One of the challenges in climate risk analysis is the lack of reliable and readily accessible data and models. In the trend of democratization of knowledge, open sources have emerged as the driving force in providing resources for climate risk assessment. However, the quality of open sources can be very disparate. Not all of them meet the analytical requirements and can be taken into use. Therefore, this article collects several well-recognized open sources on climate change research to convenience the source search process.
Climate change-related analysis covers various sub-topics, from natural risk projection to carbon emission monitoring. According to the targets, the study can require quite different data sources and methodologies. This article focuses on open sources supporting climate physical risk analysis for the purpose of financial risk management such as assessing the flood risk of certain assets in the future. Sources relate to transnational risks such as climate policies are not in the scope.
This collection is kept on updating.
Open Data Sources
[1] IPCC Data Sets
IPCC(The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) aims on providing regular assessments of climate change and potential future risks. A series of datasets are produced and used in the figures of the IPCC Report. Data used in IPCC reports are managed and distributed via The IPCC Data Distribution Centre. At the same time, IPCC also has the portal IPCC Atlas to provide direct access to data visualization.
License: No specific restriction, free for sharing and adaptation even for commercial usage.
[2] C3S (European Union)
C3S(Copernicus Climate Change Service) is hosted by European Union on providing high-quality observation data on the climate system like reducing glaciers, and temperatures in the past, current and future states of the climate globally. The Data can be accessed via the Climate Data Store toolbox, API, or Website portal. A free registered account is requested for accessing the data.
License: free of charge for any purpose in so far as it is lawful
[3] NOAA Open Data Dissemination (The U.S.)
NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) is an agency from the U.S. that provides services on weather forecasts, severe storm warnings, and climate monitoring in the U.S. and other parts of the world. NOAA Open Data Dissemination Program provides public access to NOAA’s open data such as satellite images, and climate records data for free.
License: free and available to the public without restriction on use
[4] WRI
WRI (World Resources Institute) is a global research organization that produces data, conducts research, and initiatives on seven global challenges: Food, Forests, Water, Energy, Climate, the Ocean, and Cities. Data products especially the forest change and water resources produced by WRI are free to access via their data platform.
License: openly for free, allowing anyone to use, share, and adapt our work.
[6] WorldClim
WorldClim is a database of high spatial resolution global weather and climate data. These data can be used for mapping and spatial modeling. The gridded weather and climate data for historical (near current) and future conditions.
License: The data are freely available for academic use and other non-commercial use. Redistribution or commercial use is not allowed without prior permission.
[7] OS-Climate — Global Data Commons
OS-Climate itself is an open-source collaboration community that builds the data and analytical software to support building up financial resilience and mitigate the potential risks from climate change. There are three building blocks of OS-Climate, Open-source Community, Global Data, and Analytical Tools.
OS-Climate Global Data Commons is a unified open-data platform that brings climate-related multimodel datasets from corporate data to flood data and makes climate data easier to be found and consumed. Check here and find out what kinds of data are in Global Data Commons.
License: free for using, changing, and distributing
[8] Google Earth Engine
Google Earth Engine is a computing platform backed by Google Cloud that allows users to access a wide range of earth science data like climate&weather data, and satellite images and also run geospatial analysis. Organizations mentioned above like NOAA and WRI also host the parts/whole of their open datasets in the platform. Google Earth Engine provides the API for users to access the data.
License: It’s free for non-commercial usage but price for the commercial usage.
[9] Open Data on AWS
A large amount of data from different organizations are hosted and shared in AWS. AWS also provides the infrastructure foundation to make the data be easier explored and support further analytics of the data. There are two main open data initiatives Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI) and Earth on AWS which focus on sustainability issues and earth observations.
License: Data sets are provided and maintained by a variety of third parties under a variety of licenses.
Open Analysis Tools
[1] OS-Climate — Physical Risk & Resilience Tool
In the Open Data part, we already introduced OS-Climate and its Global Data Commons. Here we will talk about the Analytical Tool Physical Risk & Resilience built on OS-Climate. Physical Risk & Resilience is one of the three tools built-in OS-Climate analytical toolsets, it follows the OASIS Framework on assessing the potential damages of a single asset or portfolio due to climate change.
License: free for using, changing, and distributing
[2] CLIMADA
CLIMADA is a fully probabilistic climate risk assessment tool developed by ETHz. It provides a framework for users to combine exposure, hazard, and vulnerability to calculate risk. Risk analysis with CLIMADA can include
- the statistical risk to your exposure from a set of events,
- how it changes under climate change, and
- a cost-benefit analysis of adaptation measures.
CLIMADA is the analytic module of ECA (Economics of Climate Adaptation), which provides adaptation strategies for national and local decision-makers to adapt and mitigate climate risk.
License: free for using, changing, and distributing
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