Work Plan

1. Determination of meteorological changes critical to the built cultural heritage

Within this task the utilization of climate models at European and Regional scale will be addressed to the specific requirements for predicting future scenarios of impacts on the built historical and archaeological environment. This will be accomplished by the identification of the parameters most critical for architectural surfaces and structures, which will involve consideration of the "traditional" meteorological parameters (i.e. temperature, relative humidity, solar radiation, precipitation), but also of the additional climate parameters most relevant for cultural heritage damage such as freeze-thaw cycles, wind-driven rain/sand, diurnal humidity cycles, solar radiation, gas and particle concentration, pH precipitation, water table level, and sea level. Once the parameters are defined, climate data available in the climate model scenarios for the next 100 years will be collected and transformed, so as to include the meteorological parameters critical to the built cultural heritage.

The scale of existing models will be considered for producing scenarios which can be applied to predict the damage to cultural heritage, to be achieved by using the global/European models applying experience from the "RegClim" models and/or Climatic Research Unit "weather generator". The involvement of two partners, UEA and NILU, in the climate modelling will allow a check on the reliability of the output through comparison with observed data.

The combination of different climate factors will allow the identification of areas affected by multiple risks.

Taking into account the different future climate threats faced by European areas (desertification, drought-floods), specific scenarios will be predicted at selected case study locations.