The Laboratory of Climatology and Climate Services is a collaboration between the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (grouping personnel from the Instituto Pirenaico de Ecología and the Experimental Station of Aula Dei) and the University of Zaragoza, formalised by means of an agreement as a virtual network of innovation in climate analysis and climate services and published in the Official State Bulletin: https://www.boe.es/diario_boe/txt.php?id=BOE-A-2023-25751. The LCSC conducts research in the fields of climatology and global change, focusing on the development of analysis tools and climate services. The members of the group have provided significant contributions to the study of climatic draughts, their causes, changes, and impacts, including the development of widely-used tools and indicators for the quantification of draughts. On the other hand, the research group has also conducted research on a wide range of topics related to variability and climate change, events of extreme precipitation, rain erosivity, vegetation dynamics, and hydrological processes at different spatial scales. The LCSC has also developed free-access software, databases, and climate services for both the scientific community and the general public. Overall, the study topics are focused on climate fluctuations, and more specifically the following:
- historical climate reconstruction based on documentary sources;
- rebuilding and homogeneity of climate databases;
- relations between atmospheric circulation and global, continental, and regional climate;
- temporal variability and trends in precipitation and temperature;
- stochastic analysis of extreme events of temperature and precipitation;
- development of tools and databases to identify and study the intensity, duration, and variability of draughts;
- assessment of changes in the relations between climate variability and stream-flows at different levels, from hillsides to large river basins;
- cross-validation of hydrological models in river basins with different plant cover;
- trend prediction of water resources in future environmental scenarios;
- consequences of global change on the management of water resources;
- vegetation dynamics by means of remote sensor techniques;
- development of climate services focused on research, including the development of databases in different regions of the world;
- climate services that provide real-time information, mostly aimed at monitoring draughts;
The group is one of Spain’s leading research teams in the study of global change from a multidisciplinary perspective, with a major international impact. In the past five years, it has published over 200 papers in international scientific journals including the Science Citation Index. Additionally, the research of the members of the group also has also had a major international impact. The members of the research team are among the most influential Spanish scientists worldwide in the field of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, are listed as highly cited researchers, and have collaborated with international experts in groups such as the IPCC or the UNCCD.