The objective of the Specific Targeted Research Project EPICA-MIS is to produce palaeoreconstructions and integrated climate analysis through marine and ice core studies. It will contribute to the development of novel paleoreconstruction methods by providing unique paleorecords and developing new proxies of critical properties of the climate system. The two Antarctic deep ice cores will be completed and they will for the first time reveal atmospheric records of greenhouse gases like CO2 and methane reaching 800,000 years back in time. Novel multi-parameter and high-resolution records of climate-relevant parameters like ice isotopes, greenhouse gases, dust and soluble impurities will be produced from the new Antarctic ice cores. They will be compared and correlated with alaeoreconstructions from marine, Greenland and other Antarctic reA key task here is to produce common timescales for the records by comparing the individual datings and by investigating novel tephra and paleomagnetic correlation methods. The produced multiproxy reconstructions will provide an outstanding platform for understanding and modelling the past and present climate. Because the reconstructions from both ocean and ice cores will be integrated and will use novel indicators for instance for sea ice, Antarctic insolation, iron or opal isotopes, climatic issues like the carbon cycle, sea surface temperature, and the climatic coupling between the northern and southern hemispheres can be addressed with new perspectives. As strategies for mitigation and adaptation to global change have to be based on predictions on future climate, the EPICA-MIS novel palaeoreconstructions will produce new evidence about climate dynamics and variability necessary to improve and test policy-relevant models. The Research Project described here goes a step further in integrating the European ice core research groups with marine palaeoclimate research groups, thus forming a strong European Research Area.

The overall goal of the European Project on Ocean Acidification (EPOCA) is to fill the numerous gaps in our understanding of the effects and implications of ocean acidification. EPOCA aims to document the changes in ocean chemistry and biogeography across space and time.

Paleo-reconstruction methods will be used on several archives, including foraminifera and deep-sea corals, to determine past variability in ocean chemistry and to tie these to present-day chemical and biological observations. EPOCA will determine the sensitivity of marine
organisms, communities and ecosystems to ocean acidification. Molecular to  biochemical, physiological and ecological approaches will be combined with laboratory and field-based perturbation experiments to quantify biological responses to ocean acidification, assess the potential for adaptation, and determine the consequences for biogeochemical cycling. Laboratory experiments will focus on key organisms selected on the basis of their ecological, biogeochemical or socio-economic importance. Field studies will be carried out in systems deemed most sensitive to ocean acidification. Results on the chemical, biological and biogeochemical impacts of ocean acidification will be integrated in biogeochemical, sediment and coupled ocean-climate models to better understand and predict the responses of the Earth system to ocean acidification. Special special attention will be paid to the potential feedbacks of the physiological changes in the carbon, nitrogen, sulfur and iron cycles. EPOCA will assess uncertainties, risks and thresholds ("tipping points") related to ocean acidification at scales ranging from subcellular,
to ecosystem and from local to global. It will also assess pathways of CO2 emissions required to avoid these thresholds and describe the state change and the subsequent risk to the marine environment and Earth system should these emissions be exceeded.

The development of interdisciplinary modelling tools and platforms to address the interactions between natural and socio-economic systems is an active research area in Europe. Nevertheless, notable gaps still exist in modelling capabilities, in particular, very little progress has been made to date in the direct coupling of models that resolve the spatial distribution of climate change with regionally resolved economic models. Interactive couplings between climate and impact models are relatively underdeveloped. Likewise, the coupling of detailed economic models with impact and adaptation models is still at a relatively early stage. Finally, a coherent assessment of uncertainty is completely lacking in overall integrated assessments. The sustainability of agriculture and land-use policies and practices including water availability and the sustainability of climate policies that rely on high shares of bio-energy are critical applications that demand a spatially resolved representation of global environmental change including feedbacks between natural and socio-economic forces.

ERMITAGE proposes to improve and extend existing modular frameworks for the coupling of intermediate complexity models of the natural and socio-economic systems to address the issues cited above. The resulting integrated assessment framework models will be applied to the analysis of post-2012 climate initiatives taking into account uncertainties and regional conflicts of interest in a coordinated way, propagating the analysis of uncertainty from climate simulation through to policy analysis, focusing particularly on the sustainability of agriculture, bio-energy and water resources.

The overall objective of the ESONIM SSA is to facilitate
the creation of a European Seafloor Observatory
Network (ESONET) by providing EU Member State
Governments with the technical, legal and financial
models and arguments to establish one or more pilot
cabled seafloor observatories. A cabled seafloor
observatory is preferable as power and data
transmission to a remote seafloor location can be
achieved via such a cable providing ample power and
broadband data telemetry from the site to the shore.
The proposed ESONET infrastructure consists of a
network of long term, multidisciplinary seafloor
observatories around the European margin providing
continuous vigilance in relation to geophysical,
biogeochemical, oceanographic and biological
phenomena.

The ESPON project 2013/1/4 “Climate change and territorial effects on regions and local economies” deals with the impacts of climate change on the European regions and their economies as well as the consequences for spatial planning. Therefore the project seeks to analyse the regional sensitivities towards climate stimuli and the likely economic effects of climate change on European regions also considering mitigation and adaptation measures. Eventually, the project aims at the development of new potential regional typologies with respect to the multitude of aspects and consequences in the context of climate change.

The European Integrated project on Aerosol Cloud Climate and Air Quality Interactions, EUCAARI, brings together the leading European research groups, state-of-the-art infrastructure and key players from third countries to investigate the role of aerosol on climate and air quality.

The objectives of EUCAARI are:
(I) Reduction of the current uncertainty of the impact of aerosol particles on climate by 50% and quantification of the relationship between anthropogenic aerosol particles and regional air quality, and
(II)Quantification of the side effects of European air quality directives on global and regional climate, and provide tools for future quantifications for different stakeholders.

EUCAARI will also contribute to technological developments in the aerosol measurement industry, enhancing future experiments and air-quality monitoring networks. The project is organised into four scientific elements designed to maximize the integration of methodologies, scales and ultimately our understanding of air quality and climate. New ground-based, aircraft and satellite measurements will be integrated with existing data to produce a global consistent dataset with the highest possible accuracy. A European measurement campaign will be designed around simultaneous multi-station observations, Lagrangian aircraft measurements and carefully selected "super-sites".

A hierarchy of models will be developed based on the results of the laboratory and theoretical investigations. The models will be used to interpret the measurements and will be integrated in regional air quality and global climate models. The result will be measurable improvements in the project's climate and air quality models. The outcomes (scenarios, recommendations, models, harmonized datasets and new knowledge) will be disseminated to authorities, policy makers, the research community, industry, instrument designers, and the EU-ESA Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES).

Cloud feedbacks remain the largest source of uncertainty in projections of future climate. They are also a major contributor to uncertainty in other feedbacks (e.g., surface albedo, carbon cycle) in the Earth System. Through interactions with the large-scale circulation, cloud processes also contribute to synoptic circulations and regional climate. They are therefore critical to the prediction of future changes in precipitation patterns, climate variability and extreme events.

The central objective of EUCLIPSE is to reduce the uncertainty in the representation of cloud processes and feedbacks in the new generation of Earth System Models (ESMs), in support of the IPCC's fifth assessment report. Novel, process-oriented evaluations of clouds in present-day and future climate simulations made by the leading European ESMs will identify the cloud types and processes responsible for the spread in climate sensitivity and future precipitation changes across the models, and for deficiencies in the simulation of the present-day climate. The new diagnostics and metrics developed in EUCLIPSE will inform targeted sensitivity experiments to isolate the processes responsible for cloud feedback uncertainty.

In EUCLIPSE, four distinct communities will work together across a set of integrated work packages over a four-year period: the observational community will provide state-of-the-art measurements from ground- and space-based active and passive remote sensing; the numerical weather prediction community will provide analyses of short timescale model biases induced by cloud processes; the cloud modeling community will provide fine-scale models as an additional tool for understanding cloud behavior in a changing climate; finally, the climate modeling community will synthesize the physical understanding and observational constraints identified by the other communities to improve the representation and assessment of cloud processes in ESMs and so improve the predictive skill of ESMs.

We propose to initialise a European Network for observations of molecular Hydrogen and to put in place a new and consistent calibration scale for molecular Hydrogen. The observational network will have 12 continuous measurements sites in Europe, 7 flask-sampling sites in Europe and 6 global flask-sampling sites. Concerning the European sites, a range of observation from clean air stations for measurements of atmospheric background to moderately polluted (e.g. urban outflow) and urban (i.e. polluted) sites was chosen.

This will enable to improve the understanding of hydrogen in the global background atmosphere and of the impact of European emissions on the present day atmosphere, e.g. using local modelling techniques and radon flux calculations. We further propose to perform budget studies of molecular hydrogen (on a global and regional scale) and to study sinks and sources. Especially the important soil sink will be studied (mechanistically and experimentally).

A first systematic study of isotopic composition of molecular hydrogen in the atmosphere is proposed, using observations from global and European flask sampling sites and global models, which hydrogen isotope fractionation processes will be incorporated. Global and regional models will be used to investigate the budget of atmospheric hydrogen, by comparing mixing ratios and isotope ratios between model and observations and by varying underlying model emission patterns.

The Proposal further includes some studies to assess the impact of atmospheric hydrogen on the present day atmosphere, i.e. the influence on the oxidation capacity of the troposphere, the lifetimes of greenhouse gases like CH4 and on the stratospheric budgets of water vapour and ozone. Some exploratory studies will be carried out to investigate these impacts under changed atmospheric hydrogen levels, associated with the use of hydrogen as a carrier of economy.

The objective of the project EUSAAR is the integration of measurements of atmospheric aerosol properties performed in a distributed network of 20 high quality European ground-based stations. This integration contributes to a sustainable and reliable operational service in support of policy issues on air quality, long-range transport of pollutants and climate change. The project will be coordinated by CNRS in Clermont-Ferrand and activity leaders are world-recognized experts in the field of aerosol research.

The lack of coordination programs for non-regulated measurements of aerosol properties is considered a major gap in Earth Observation that urgently needs to be filled. The objective of the networking activities is to ensure most efficient use of available resources by:
1- harmonization and validation of current measurement of particle optical, physical and chemical properties performed at Supersites as these are critical to ensure their scientific value (N2, N3, N4);
2- centralization of the validated measurements in a common data base accessible to all users (N5);
3- spreading well practices and disseminate information on new protocols both within and outside the project.

Trans-National Access (TA1-TA11) is provided for 11 Supersites with long record of international access, outstanding instrumentation for atmospheric research and highly relevant long-term monitoring data series. The joint research activities have the common objectives to develop affordable and sustainable solutions to improve monitoring strategies and products that will advance up-to-date data reporting across Europe. This concerns retrieval of the aerosol column with a novel technology (JRA1), development of a new generation of humidity-controlled instruments (JRA2) and new methodologies for real-time acquisition of aerosol parameters (JRA3). A major concern of EUSAAR is that activities consolidate current observation efforts and ensure their continuation beyond the present project.

The Kyoto Protocol, which the EU has recently ratified, calls for a quantitative reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2008 to 2010. However global emissions, sources and sinks, are not accurately known. EVERGREEN proposes to improve this situation by using the measurements of ENVISAT, a European Earth Observation satellite. Improved greenhouse gas emission inventories will be produced from a combination of measurement and (inverse) modelling. The feasibility and quality of the method will be assessed. Measurements include (partial) columns of CO₂, CH₄, N₂O, CO, O₃, NO₂ and H₂O. The focus will be on methane and carbon monoxide and on regional and seasonal variations. Carbon dioxide source and sink strengths will be included on a best-effort basis. End-user involvement is arranged through participation of one coal industry and several national/European institutes, with responsibility for environment and climate issues.