Ouranos is an innovation and consultation hub, created to develop knowledge about climate change, its impacts and adaptation solutions in Quebec.
Ouranos is an innovation and consultation hub, created to develop knowledge about climate change, its impacts and adaptation solutions in Quebec. Thanks to its network of over 450 researchers, Ouranos is able to identify the risks for Quebec society, and help decision-makers implement the best adaptation strategies.
This network of researchers brings together a wide range of expertise covering a large part of the “climate-decision” scientific continuum, and provides input for its scientific program. This program is structured around 8 highly interrelated adaptation priorities, which consider the social, environmental, economic and built environment dimensions. Central to and supporting these programming priorities and projects is the development of a climate science and climate services strategy.
Based on rigorous scientific knowledge, Ouranos’ mission is to help Quebec society better adapt to climate change.
To this end, Ouranos acts as a boundary organization, ensuring links and cohesion between the scientific community and adaptation stakeholders. Proposing a shared leadership approach, Ouranos fosters an environment of evolving research in which all players take ownership of the issues and actively contribute to solutions.
The organization’s main actions are to:
Ouranos deploys climate tools to support decision-makers working to adapt to climate change.
A climate information portal, Climate Portraits offers spatial information for Quebec, enabling visualization of both historical data and projected changes using climate models. It is aimed at researchers, experts and practitioners as well as the general public.
Several user-friendly visualization formats are offered, such as maps, figures showing the evolution of changes, and summary tables. It is also possible to download the data and figures generated.
The site presents an ensemble of CMIP6 climate model results for SSP2-4.5, SSP3-7.0 and SSP5-8.5 emissions scenarios from 1950 to 2100. Model outputs are post-processed to remove biases relative to Environment and Climate Change Canada’s RDRS v2.1 (Regional Deterministic Reforecast System, Gasset et al. 2021) reanalysis.
The PAVICS climate data analysis platform is designed for users wishing to analyze climate data within a Python programming environment. PAVICS provides direct access to and analysis of multiple climate and weather data sets, without the need to download them locally. The platform facilitates the spatio-temporal partitioning of data, bias correction and the calculation of numerous climate indicators, as well as the creation of maps and graphs, and offers hydrological modelling tools.
In a user-friendly manner, the Ouranos website brings together all the relevant information you need to understand climate and adaptation to climate change in Quebec. A comprehensive, high-performance search tool makes it easy to find relevant research projects which are housed together in a dedicated section on the website.
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This project was undertaken with the support of:
