An experiment in Climate Service portability: implementing a Danish Climate Atlas in Ghana

Climate services provide tailored information to support climate adaptation at the local level. However, the highly specific local needs of each setting also means that they are difficult to generalise and transport from one setting to another. In this presentation we describe a collaboration between Denmark and Ghana to establish climate services in Ghana. The template for this Ghanaian climate service is Klimaatlas, the Danish National Climate Atlas, a well-established tool used by actors throughout Denmark as one of the primary tools underpinning local climate adaptation planning. Klimaatlas presents projections from the EURO-CORDEX regional climate model ensemble, bias-corrected against local observations, in the form of an interactive web-interface and tailored reports. Our initial efforts show that some parts of the Klimaatlas approach to developing a climate service can be reused directly in Ghana, particularly around user engagement and some aspects of the presentation of information: other parts however need to be rethought from scratch.  In particular, the large data volumes associated with CORDEX ensembles present a major bottleneck for applications in Ghana, where both bandwidth and storage are limited. Ensuring the robustness and durability of the service will also be critical to its success and have received particular attention. Furthermore, while there is a wealth of observational data, much of it cannot be used for bias correction in its current form. We will describe our efforts to solve these problems and the lessons learned, and present recommendations for how the climate service community can aid the development of climate services in developing countries.