Set against the inspiring backdrop of Alexandria, the Mediterranean Capital of Culture 2025, a joint training organised by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM) took place on 16–17 December 2025 at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Egypt. E-DREAM project marked a successful double participation throughout the event, represented by Rizos-Theodoros Chadoulis and Aggelos Georgakis from BEYOND / National Observatory of Athens (NOA), the project's coordinator.
The two-day training explored how climate and atmospheric data can be harnessed to address two of the Mediterranean’s most pressing priorities: advancing the renewable energy transition and protecting shared cultural heritage from escalating climate risks.
Bringing together participants from across the Mediterranean region, the event aimed to equip attendees with practical skills for using tools and datasets from the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) and the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS). By combining scientific expertise with regional perspectives, the event demonstrated how freely available Copernicus data can support informed decision-making, climate adaptation strategies, and the safeguarding of World Heritage sites.
E-DREAM’s strong presence
E-DREAM marked a successful double participation throughout the event, represented by Rizos-Theodoros Chadoulis and Aggelos Georgakis from BEYOND / National Observatory of Athens (NOA). On behalf of the project, they showcased E-DREAM’s mission to drive climate-resilient renewable energy deployment across the Mediterranean, leveraging CAMS and C3S data, scientific innovation, and strong collaboration.
E-DREAM’s contributions highlighted how actionable maps, risk assessments, and forecasts of energy droughts and extreme events can support smarter investments, optimized site selection, and more reliable and resilient energy production.
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Day 1 – Session 3: The Data Opportunity
Driving Energy Resilience with CAMS and C3S: Lessons Learned from E-DREAM and DRE
Speaker: Rizos-Theodoros Chadoulis -
Day 2 – Session 2: Practical Session (Solar Energy)
Leveraging C3S, CAMS, and DestinE Extremes DT Datasets – Solar Energy Insights from E-DREAM and the DRE DestinE Use Case
Speaker: Aggelos Georgakis
This hands-on practical session moderated by Aggelos Georgakis featured a Jupyter notebook–based interactive exercise, guiding participants through:
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Handling and preprocessing CAMS solar radiation time-series data,
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Using ECMWF Digital Twin (DestinE) global horizontal irradiance (GHI) forecasts, and
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Exploring machine-learning training and inference for photovoltaic (PV) power output forecasting.
Key objectives of the session included solar radiation data handling and building simple ML models for PV power estimation. With participants from academia, the private sector, and NGOs, the session fostered active engagement. Attendees followed the exercise step by step, raising practical questions about data access, dataset availability, and how to adapt the ML workflow to their own use cases.
Event Info: https://ufmsecretariat.org/event/climate-data-training-for-the-mediterranean/
Rizos-Theodoros Chadoulis, BEYOND/NOA
Aggelos Georgakis, BEYOND/NOA
Aggelos Georgakis, BEYOND/NOA
From left to right: Aggelos Georgakis, BEYOND/NOA, Rizos-Theodoros Chadoulis, BEYOND/NOA, Prof. Hesham El-Askary, Chapman University