The end-users of the SUDPLAN services are city planners who can either work directly in the system or they can use different kinds of scientific users – IT, environmental modellers, statisticians etc – to support them. End-users will be able to evaluate risk hazards of storm water local runoff, river flooding and elevated air pollution levels for planned or existing urban areas subject to a changing climate.

SUDPLAN services will be demonstrated for four city pilots: Stockholm, Wuppertal, Linz and Prague. However, whatever European city may access the same Common Services as the pilots and they can also develop own local applications.

The dimensioning of urban infrastructure is typically based on a statistical calculation of historical time series data. As examples, this can be done by quantifying the maximum river runoff during a 100 year period, identifying the most intense rainfall occurring within a similar period or determine the risk for a critically high air pollution episode.

The temperature increase, changes in precipitation and air pollution levels – both expressed as yearly totals and as extreme values – and storm frequencies expected to occur during the coming decades will invalidate those historical time series analysis and call for new statistical assessments based on forecasted weather scenarios up to and beyond 2050. The SUDPLAN planning tools will make it possible for city planners to include such analysis in a simple, early and cost-effective manner.

A modeller on the urban scale will thus be able to generate input and boundary data to his local scale application from a chain of larger scale models, this without gathering a group of experts on climate, hydrology and air quality models.

SUDPLAN Common Services will provide a number of climate scenarios from global climate models, downscaled first to the regional (Europe) scale and further downscaled to the urban scale. The downscaling will end in “best possible” precipitation, temperature, hydrological and air quality data for a period typically stretching from 1960 up to 2050 and beyond. The presentation of multiple downscaling results that differ in choice of global climate model or initialisation values, will give information of the uncertainty of the long-term scenarios.

SUDPLAN has the ambition to be compliant with existing infrastructures supporting the emerging SISE (Single Information Space in Europe for the Environment). Today, there are many autonomous applications focusing on flooding, water runoff and air pollution. Some also include risk assessments with a changing climate. The models are hard-wired into such applications and adaptations are difficult to undertake.

The project intends to close this gap by providing planners and decision makers in the urban context with a web-based scenario management environment providing advanced modelling services.

The web-based tool will allow end-users to manage scenarios, to execute, visualise and compare them with each other and with real developments over 3-space and time, in order to carry out scenario-based prediction, damage assessment, planning and training, which uses 3D/4D modelling, simulation and visualisation coupled with existing resources like sensor networks.

SUDPLAN will connect to existing systems and infrastructures using existing service-oriented architectures (SOA). Emerging SISE developments (INSPIRE, GMES) use the SOA paradigm because it offers dynamic recombination of services in a loosely coupled fashion.

The SUDPLAN communication and service infrastructure will be based on the standards and specifications of OGC, and will re-use FP6 ORCHESTRA and FP6 SANY concepts, specifications and software components, as well as other open source software, where appropriate for the communication and service infrastructure.