There exists an enormous interest in society, politics, public, business and, in consequence, the need for an early and reliable provision of evaluated and reliable monthly to centennial trends of possible future climate development and information on strength and frequency of upcoming extreme climate events. Built on the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), a seamless web information portal will be set up. It implements a national downstream product focusing on German users and will be presented in German language. Thus, the website implements the national implementation of C3S climate services in Germany. The website will be integrated into the DWD internet site and will consider the Copernicus guidelines for websites, provided that they do not contradict the corporate design specifications of the DWD. To address international users as well, the website will also be available in English language.

This web-based system will be easily accessible and understandable to attract unexperienced users but also users with climate service background. It will cover the different time horizons of climate predictions from monthly outlook to decadal climate predictions and climate projections indicating global climate change characteristics for Germany. Users will be involved in the design of the portal to promote user-friendliness and uptake by new users.

The knowledge and needs of the users are very divers: some users need the data provided directly, others rely on heavily aggregated numerical values or simplified figures. A central task of this project is to identify the needs of the different user groups and to develop such highly aggregated numbers and figures.

The intention of the "seamless web" is the compilation of this climate information on an internet portal of the DWD in a user-friendly manner for the different types of climatic events or parameters on different time scales in a uniform and seamless form. A central goal of the envisaged seamless web portal is to summarize the results of different forecast systems in a seamless manner such that users do no longer have to care about the different sources of climate forecasts or projections. The aim is to enable especially national users to receive the climate information needed directly from the web portal without insight knowledge of the underlying data base and provide a national implementation of Copernicus Climate Change Services with the focus on German users.

The provision of user relevant information only is ensured by an intense and frequent dialogue between users and providers. For this, the web-based development is supported by annual user workshops. Regular newsletters inform registered users about changes and news. The service to be built gives the user a significant added value compared to existing websites. It opens up a simple accessibility via a state of the art visualisation, which differs from the often scientifically-technologically embossed websites.

The data basis for this is the C3S data services: sectoral Information System (SIS), Climate Data store (CDS) and evaluation and quality Control (EQC). It is planned to implement this as a German user-related foundation of the Copernicus data information and access service (Dias).

Besides the technical development of the automated workflow producing regular updates of the figures, a major focus will be on the development of appropriate forms of representation covering a broad range of sectors (socio-economy, hydrology, etc.). These developments are carried out in close exchange with the national users of the products.

Outputs and Results

• A user-friendly and tailored “seamless web” information portal from monthly forecasts to climate projections
• Information and data on climate forecasts and climate change tailored to national user needs including information on the quality of climate data provided and the forecast skill; the information will be updated automatically when changes are made to the database, giving users the opportunity to obtain up-to-date, consistent data
• The results will be summarized in a report