This is a Jupyter Book providing hands-on tools and explanations to help European regions and municipalities estimate past and future exposure of people to extreme precipitation. It has been developed in the context of the VALORADA project to support the use of climate data; specifically the promotion of 'good practice' and showcase how open-source data can be used to support regional climate risk and vulnerability assessments.
This resource supports local decision-makers and analysts in assessing climate risks associated with extreme precipitation using open climate and population data. The notebooks follow the (diataxis framework)[https://diataxis.fr], which is a systematic, user-centric approach to technical documentation. Following this framework, documentation is categorized into four distinct types based on the user's needs --- tutorials, how-to guides, references, and explanation --- rather than just the structure of the software. This approach allows VALORADA to support intermediaries access climate data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) and showcase how the approach can be made scalable to other regions and climate hazards. The categories comprise:
- Tutorials — end-to-end storylines (e.g. changing hazard and population, changing exposure)
- How-to guides — step-by-step instructions for acquiring and processing input datasets (climate hazard, population, regional boundaries)
- Explanations — background on extreme precipitation and climate risks (hazard × exposure × vulnerability)
- References — technical references and background information
| Type | Dataset |
|---|---|
| Projections of extreme precipitation | C3S Climate Atlas |
| Population | GHS-POP and GHS-WUP-POP (EU Global Human Settlement Layer) |
| Regions | NUTS2 shapefiles (Eurostat, 2024) |
The notebooks can be run directly in the browser — no local installation needed:
To run locally, create the conda environment:
conda env create -f environment.yml
conda activate drought_exposuretutorials/ # Storyline notebooks
how-to-guides/ # Data acquisition and processing guides
explanation/ # Background science and methodology
references/ # Project and data references
data/ # Input data (not everything is tracked in git, see how-to-guides to create all data)
This work was produced in the context of the VALORADA project (Validated Local Risk Actionable Data for Adaptation), funded by the European Union under Horizon Europe Grant Agreement No. 101112837. VALORADA supports the EU Adaptation Mission to help 150 regions and communities become climate-resilient by 2030.
The tools are developed at the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), operated by ECMWF.