The European Climate Research Alliance is a bottom-up association of European research institutions helping to facilitate the development of climate change research, combining the capacities of national research institutions and inducing closer ties between existing national research initiatives, projects and infrastructures. This article briefly introduces the network's structure and organisation, as well as project management issues and prospects.

Projections of a potential hydropower production were evaluated in terms of probability of water resources available in the future. The future projections of annual river runoff were evaluated on average, as well as on low and high exceedance probabilities under several climate change scenarios. The main idea of the modelling method used is to simulate statistical estimators of annual river runoff (mean, variation and skewness) instead of runoff time series.

An online survey was used to map the needs and preferences of the Finnish general public about extended-range forecasts and their presentation. Survey results guided the co-design process of novel extended-range forecasts in the project. The respondents considered that the tailored extended-range forecasts would be beneficial in planning activities, preparing for weather risks and scheduling everyday life. They also valued impact information higher than advice on how to prepare for the impacts.

Finnish Meteorological Institute and Helen Ltd examined the feasibility of long-range forecasts (longer than two weeks) of temperature for needs of the energy sector in Helsinki, Finland. In this study, we examined the quality of Heating degree day (HDD) forecasts. As the forecasts we used UK Met Office seasonal forecasts. The long-range forecasts of monthly HDD showed some skill in Helsinki in winter 2015–2016, up to two months, especially if the very cold January is excluded.

Freezing rain is a high-impact wintertime weather phenomenon. The direct damage it causes to critical infrastructure (transportation, communication and energy) and forestry can be substantial. In this work a method for estimating the occurrence of freezing rain was evaluated and used to derive the climatology. The method was able to accurately reproduce the observed, spatially aggregated annual variability. The highest frequencies of freezing rain were found in eastern and central Europe.

We studied the impact of projected climate change on the risk of snow-induced forest damage in Finland. Although winters are projected to become milder over the whole of Finland, our results suggest than in eastern and northern Finland the risk may increase while in southern and western parts of the country it is projected to decrease. This indicates that there is increasing need to consider the potential of snow damage in forest management in eastern and northern Finland.

The number of large forest fires in Finland will most likely increase during the twenty-first century in response to projected climate change. This would increase the risk that some of the fires could develop into real conflagrations which have become almost extinct in Finland due to effective fire suppression. However, our results show considerable inter-model variability, demonstrating the large uncertainty related to the rate of the projected change in forest-fire danger.

Wind speed measured at the German stations correlate well with reanalysis fields. Monthly means from two global reanalyses (ERA-20C, ERA-Interim) and one regional reanalysis (COSMO-REA6) were analysed and correlate well for the majority of the German stations. Thus we conclude that the monthly and seasonal anomalies recorded at these stations can be understood as representative for a spatial area comparable to the resolution of the reanalyses, at least for the recent years.

Emergency rescue data and weather reanalysis data were combined to study the spatial and decadal characteristics of potential forest damage days in Finland due to windstorms. The most prone area for damage days was the south-western part of Finland. Results also indicated a lull period during the 1990s compared to the 1980s and 2000s, albeit no trend was evident. The study highlighted the importance of not only focusing on wind speeds, but also soil conditions.

Many users of climate information are unaware of the availability of reanalysis feedback data and input observations, and uptake of feedback data is rather low. The most important factors limiting the use of this data is that the users feel that there is no easy interface to get the data or they do not find it at all. The relevant communities should invest resources to develop tools and provide training to bridge the gap between current capabilities and comprehensive exploitation of the data.

We assessed the quality of the seasonal precipitation forecasts issued by Regional Climate Outlook Forum for Malawi and Zambia. The forecasts, issued in August, are of rainy season rainfall accumulations for early and late season. The forecasts are rather well-calibrated, but cannot discriminate between different events. But these results can be too pessimistic, because forecasts have gone through much development lately, and forecasts using current methodology might have performed better.