INTRODUCTION
The ECLAIRE geographic focus on Europe and temporal coverage of the time period to 2050 and possibly beyond provides an outline of requirements to the scenarios to be used within the project. Consistency with international research activities (other projects funded under FP7, science activities supporting the work of IPCC) and with scientific support to the European Commission also was strived for. Most importantly, all recommended scenarios needed to be accessible to the respective modelling teams, which was safeguarded by providing web-links or direct data access.
In defining the scenarios, also information on spatial resolution (0.5°x0.5° is like a standard provided for IPCC modelling work – but GAINS data mostly focusses on countries) and temporal resolution (often annual, but sometimes this is the consequence of interpolation: GAINS uses 5-year increments) is provided. Standard products may not come up to the requirements of specific models, in which case model developers needed to perform final adaptation steps.
Available scenarios are subdivided into “meteorology”, “emissions” and “land cover/use”. The respective sections provide information on (potentially different) datasets throughout the project duration, trying to capture in which parts of the project data has been used, and inform on upcoming improvements that may be relevant beyond the end of the project. Even between these divisions, we strived for compatibility of the background data between the respective scenarios.