LOCALISED focuses on the downscaling of country-level decarbonization pathways to a regional level. From a research point of view, this compels a literature review of existing downscaling methods, experimentation, and an analysis of the results. Furthermore, the downscaling of decarbonization pathways requires, as input, a plethora of data encompassing regional climate conditions, energy supply mix, sectoral energy demand, building stock, population, etc.
Within the project’s workflow, the downscaling results serve as input to further tasks such as the development of a mitigation and adaptation measures optimization model. Should these tasks be postponed until the results of downscaling are ready? The answer is NO! We, the members involved in the LOCALISED project, strongly believe that agile software development [1] is as relevant in research as it is in industrial applications. Therefore, within the scope of the LOCALISED project, we work on each software development task iteratively in order to avoid bottlenecks in the project workflow.
There have been two major iterations of the downscaling task thus far:
Iteration 1: The developed decarbonization pathways [2] were downscaled using a simple approach whereby the values at the country level are distributed to its regions using the regional population as a proxy indicator. This method is depicted in Figure 1. We saved the results and made these available to the partners.
This process not only allowed us to provide the first downscaled results to the partners but also to create a skeleton-codebase that could be used to perform further work on the downscaling methods.
Iteration 2: We designed a database and an API that enables our partners to query the data, thus eliminating the need for the circulation of files containing the results of disaggregation.
It is planned that the results of downscaling will be provided to end-users via an open access data-sharing platform. This iteration has allowed us to create a skeleton data-sharing platform.
Through the established feedback process within the project, the downscaling methods and the software infrastructure are improving continuously. An update regarding open sourcing the data-sharing platform will follow soon.
References:
[1] Abrahamsson, Pekka, et al. “Agile software development methods: Review and analysis.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1709.08439 (2017).
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