During 10t^h and 11^th May 2016 the Kick-off meeting of the project VISCA (Vineyards Integrated Smart Climate Application) took place in the premises of CAVAS CODORNIU (Sant Sadurní d’Anoia, Barcelona, Spain), Spanish end-user and partner. The kick-off meeting was celebrated in order to introduce all partners, explain general and specific objectives of every Work Package, and define the next 6-12 months actions and activities. The first day was devoted to the presentation of partners, presentation of EC programme and initiatives on climate service by the Project Officer, as well as explanation of all WPs: WP1: Project Management, WP2: Climatic & Agricultural Data, WP3: Climate service and mobile application, WP4: Demonstration and WP5: Exploitation, Dissemination and Communication

The second day was devoted to the definition of end user’s requirements and actions to integrate WP2, WP3 and WP4.

The objective of this deliverable is the reporting of the outcomes of the end-user requirement analysis, providing their identified needs for the overall project; in particular, the requirements they need with respect to models and Decision Support System (DSS). First, a description of each pilot plot together with the technique to apply is made for every pilot site: Spain, Italy and Portugal. With this information, which is the basis of the requirements, and taking into account the models that will run and feed the DSS (meteorological, phenological, irrigation, etc.), the overall information flow of the system has been outlined. The data managed by the DSS are in 3 macro categories: Initial User Inputs, Monitoring, and User Feedback, for which requirements have been compiled in Table 4, according to end-users needs.  Further, Monitoring data has been subdivided according to these categories: short term weather forecast, medium-term weather forecast, seasonal forecast, phenological and irrigation models. Initial User Inputs are used to set the initial conditions for the models, while User Feedbacks to validate their outcomes and fine-tune next iterations. Finally, the use cases and end-user requirement, which have been co-created with and validated by the project end-users, are listed for the CS-DSS are listed in Tables 5 and 6, respectively

The current document presents the specifications of VISCA project website, the different sections it contains and contents. The outline of the website was previously suggested by SEMIDE and reviewed by VISCA partners. The URL of the website is (www.visca.eu), and it has the purpose of disseminating information about the project objectives, the involved partners, demonstration, technology, dissemination activities and other relevant information related to the project. The targeted audience of the document is the project consortium (partners), in order to ease the plan for their contribution to the website’s content.

The Communication and Dissemination plan (D5.2) gives an overview on the whole communication and dissemination activities to be carried out by VISCA consortium. It defines the dissemination objectives, key messages, target audiences, as well as specific objectives for each identified target group. In addition, D5.2 identifies the dissemination channels to be used, promotional materials as well as the training workshops. Details on the financial & human resources and timing are provided.  The annex of the document provides more details on the stakeholders targeted by WP5 ‘Exploitation, Dissemination and Communication’.

Finally, this plan is conducted in order to achieve the maximum impact and reach the relevant audiences. All partners in VISCA partners are expected to use it as a guideline for their dissemination activities throughout the duration of the project.

The Data Management Plan describes the VISCA data management life cycle for the data to be collected, processed and/or generated by the project. It will be used as a standard data guideline for the project consortium to ensure interoperability and possible sharing for public of dataset generated by the project. VISCA intends, as much as possible, to participate to the Open Research Data Pilot (ORDP) initiated in H2020, in particular for data used in scientific publications issued during the lifetime of the project. Foreseen datasets linked to scientific publications are described in this report. Both scientific publications and underlying data will be published on the open science platform XENODO, compliant with the EU OpenAire initiative. Ethics requirements and personal data management are also addressed under this deliverable.

The Innovation Management Plan (D1.4) reports on the outcomes of some activities performed in Task 1.4 "Innovation management. Engagement with Project Advisory Board (PAB) and end users" aiming to set up an efficient and effective IMS within VISCA project, useful to reach both technical and commercial goals. In particular, the aim of this deliverable is to describe the overall VISCA innovation management process and system in line with the CEN/TS 16555-1 Guidelines. These guidelines provide information upon the key elements of an Innovation Management System (IMS). Starting from the analysis of these key elements, the current document focuses on VISCA project and presents the core components its IMS.  

In this task we have assessed the quality of two seasonal forecast systems (European Centre for Middle-range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF) System 4 and SEAS5), two bias correction approaches (calibration and simple bias correction) and a downscaling strategy (calibration). This has been achieved with a common set of deterministic and probabilistic metrics: the correlation of the ensemble-mean (deterministic), the fair Ranked Probability Skill Score (FRPSS, probabilistic), the fair Continuous Ranked Probability Skill Score (FCRPSS, probabilistic) and with reliability diagrams (probabilistic). These metrics are important for the wine partners because they provide information about different aspects of the predictions that contribute to increase the robustness of their decision-making processes at seasonal time-scales.

The results obtained show that there is some degree of predictability in the three demo-sites in different variables that can provide value beyond the customary use of climatology. Moreover, the verification / bias-correction / downscaling workflow developed in this task provides the basics of all future refinements that we will conduct during the remaining two years of the project, e. g. through the exploration of new seasonal prediction systems and/or downscaling techniques.

A detailed description of the weather models and processes applied to develop the weather forecast products for the VISCA project in the context of task 2.2 in work package 2 is presented in this document. In the VISCA project, two kinds of products are delivered: short-term weather forecasts and mid-term weather forecast. While having in two days in advance the weather forecast product is useful for near future in-field activities, having weather forecast information ten days in advance could be useful to wine producers to minimize risks related to coming extreme events. For instance, if a heat wave is forecasted in 6 days, wine producers could act in advance irrigating the field more than usual before the event. Meteosim (MET) has developed and supplied weather forecasts services, which consisted in deliver the best prediction of high impact weather variables at forecast time scales from hours up to 10 days (240 hours). For the short-term forecast (up to 48 hours), a regional weather forecast model is used. On the other hand, a probabilistic model is used for mid-term forecast (up to 10 days).

Finally, all weather forecast products are sent to the VDI (VISCA Data Interface), where other modellers and end-users can download these information for their use in the VISCA platform.