Climate predictions are our most valuable tools to support socio-economic decision-making from regional to local scales and develop successful adaptation strategies. Their level of accuracy is determined by our understanding of the climate system and our capacity to simulate it correctly. While current prediction models exhibit high skill in predicting sea surface temperature in key regions – like the North Atlantic or the Tropical Pacific – from months to years in advance, their ability to predict the atmospheric circulation and through it the continental climate is undermined by structural model problems. These problems point to a misrepresentation of key processes and interactions. PREDDYCT focuses on the North Atlantic, the region where the structural problems manifest more clearly. Its aim is to bring a new fundamental understanding of the physical mechanisms that need to be realistically simulated to provide climate predictability to its neighbouring continents. The main working hypothesis is that mesoscale eddies – whose contribution is unresolved in current prediction models – are the key element. This is supported by the fact that in the North Atlantic region, resolving the effect of mesoscale ocean eddies and the atmospheric eddy feedback onto the midlatitude jet has been shown to critically improve the realism of air-sea interactions and their influence on the large-scale atmospheric circulation. In light of this, PREDDYCT will combine a new generation of predictions at ground-breaking resolutions, an innovative tuning framework to enhance their accuracy, and extensive process-oriented analyses to, for the first time, resolve and understand the contribution of mesoscale eddies to North Atlantic climate predictability. PREDDYCT’s new conceptual and methodological insights will pave the way for further forecasting advances at the global scale and contribute to achieve a long-awaited breakthrough in the realism and trustworthiness of climate predictions.

MeDiTwin harnesses the global scientific leadership of advanced partners in AI for Earth Observation, emphasizing physics-guided ML, explainable AI, and causality. It prioritizes an extensive capacity-building agenda, aiming to enhance research capacity and elevate the international standing of NTUA's School of Surveying Engineering and Geoinformatics. This collaboration centers on the development and utilization of the proposed Mediterranean Digital Twin (MDT), a research asset that promises to deepen our understanding of Earth's processes, especially in the context of the climate emergency. Our commitment is demonstrated through an innovative research project focused on modeling climate extremes and impacts in the Mediterranean, addressing crucial global challenges related to climate change.

A climate resilient society requires reliable monitoring and forecasting information of the climate trends, patterns and disturbances, both at global and regional scales. Through CONsistent representation of temporal variations of boundary Forcings in reanalysES and Seasonal forecasts, CONFESS will contribute to the emerging societal need for an enhanced Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) that can support adaptation and mitigation strategies facing increased frequency and intensity of climate extremes. The aim of CONFESS is to improve the reliability and usability of C3S information in the land-atmosphere coupled system by exploiting new and improved Earth Observations data records of land-use, vegetation states and surface-emitted aerosols delivered across different Copernicus Services. CONFESS developments will be integrated consistently for use in future C3S systems, enhancing the service’s accuracy by representing annual changes of land use, adding satellite-derived and prognostic vegetation states along with aerosols emissions due to hazardous/extreme events such as volcanic eruptions and large-scale biomass burning (e.g. wildfires). The added capacity to represent temporal variations and trends of these variables and the occurrence of hazardous/extreme events will be supported by a rapid uptake of new Earth Observations. The impact on the Earth system will be evaluated on the quality of global reanalysis as well as seasonal forecasts using state-of-the-art modelling systems. The infrastructure and knowledge developed within CONFESS will contribute to improve the C3S capabilities for reliable monitoring and forecasting with particular focus on extremes.

This project proposes to design OpenCUBE, a full-stack solution of a validated European Cloud computing blueprint to be deployed on European hardware infrastructure. OpenCUBE will develop a custom cloud installation with the guarantee that an entirely European solution like SiPearl processors and Semidynamics RISC-V accelerators can be deployed reproducibly. OpenCUBE will be built on industry-standard open APIs using Open Source components and will provide a unified software stack that captures the different best practices and open source tooling on the operating system, middleware, and system management level. It will thus provide a solid basis for the European cloud services, research, and commercial deployments envisioned to be core for federated digital services via Gaia-X. To remain competitive for the European Green Deal, OpenCUBE is designed to make energy awareness a core feature at all levels of the stack, exploiting the advanced features of the SiPearl Rhea processor family at the hardware level and exposing the necessary API at the site level, up to and including interfaces to the electricity grid. This project will leverage representative workloads like those of ECMWF characteristics for production and Digital Twin workflows as drivers for the design and deployment of the cluster infrastructure. We will collaborate closely with the projects developing the virtual environments and the open hardware interfaces for current and future European processor and coprocessor technology.