CMCC is proud to present CLIME, a special purpose Geographic Information System (GIS) software integrated in ESRI ArcGIS Desktop 10.X developed by ISC Division – Impacts on Soil and Coasts Division, in order to easily evaluate multiple climate features and study climate changes over specific geographical domains with their related effects on environment, including impacts on soil.
Impact models (e.g hydraulic or stability models) are usually developed in a GIS environment, since they need an accurate territory description. Therefore, CLIME has been designed to bridge the usually existing gap between atmospherical, observed and simulated data, gathered from different sources, and impact communities.

Developed as a GIS add-in tool, CLIME software has been conceived for research activities of ISC Division in order to assist a wide users range, dealing as interface and data manager with both meteorological and climate data, and also featuring impact analysis utilities. Therefore, it is possible to analyze and compare multiple series (observations, climate simulations, etc.) and to obtain, through filters and internal functions, many kinds of analysis, like trends and seasonal cycles, PDFs and scatter plots, with related statistics. The tool also allows the representation of several kinds of maps, as climate anomalies (thermal and pluviometric) and bias for weather average or extreme values; in addition, it features some bias correction techniques for climate model results.
Summarizing, CLIME is able to provide users a simple and fast way to retrieve analysis over climate data and observations within any geographical site of interest (provinces, regions, countries, etc).

CLIME software has been used in Orientgate, Gemina and Nextdata projects, and it has been officially presented and used in three CMCC research paper:

• RP0184 – A simulation over the Mediterranean area with COSMO-CLM: assessment of the performances;
• RP0183 – Assessment of ERA-Interim driven simulation over Italy with COSMO-CLM;
• RP0181 – Simulation of the period 1979-2011 over China with the regional climate model COSMO-CLM.

It has been used in meeting presentations, such as

• “Performance evaluation of COSMO-CLM over Italy and climate projections for the XXI century”, presented at the first SISC annual conference;
• “Very high resolution simulations with COSMO-CLM over Alpine space: benefits versus costs”, presented at CORDEX 2013 conference;
• “Climate simulations over MENA-CORDEX domain with COSMO-CLM”, presented in the framework of the project CLIMASOUTH.

Moreover, CLIME results have appeared in the article “Performance evaluation of a high-resolution regional climate simulation in the Alpine space and analysis of extreme events”, recently submitted to the Journal of Geophysical Research.