Now available: regional climate simulations of the CORDEX CORE activity

Dear SPARC colleagues,

we encourage to take the opportunity for collaborations with our fellow WCRP project CORDEX. Please find below a message from the CORDEX CORE activity. The SPARC office is happy to establish contact.

Dear colleagues,

The regional climate simulations of the CORDEX CORE activity are now available in the ESGF (see, e.g. https://esgf-data.dkrz.de/search/cordex-dkrz/ and look for the XXX-22 domains, for other RegCM simulations not available in ESGF, please find further information on data access in http://users.ictp.it/~jciarlo/).

The simulations cover all major inhabited areas of the world at a resolution of 25km. Two RCMs (RegCM from ICTP and REMO from GERICS) are used to downscale three GCMs at two RCPs (RCP2.6 and RCP8.5).

Purpose of CORDEX CORE

Provide a foundation of high-resolution regional climate model projections to improve the understanding of local fine scale phenomena and to allow ensemble-based vulnerability, impact, adaptation and climate services research world-wide.

CORDEX CORE

… aims to create an initial homogeneous dowscaled ensemble
… aims at covering the major populated areas of the world
… will be extended by further simulations in the regions
… will allow new research:

  • to assess future climate (mean, extremes and hazards, …)
  • to study one phenomena across multiple domains (e.g., monsoons, tropical cyclones)
  • to assess consistency of climate change signals and possible added value (in comparison with coarser resolution)

Method

CORDEX CORE is designed

  • to use a core set of RCMs
  • RegCM and REMO (so far)
  • to downscale a core set of GCMs with high, medium and low Climate Sensitivity
  • HadGEM (backup: MIROC5)
  • MPI-ESM (backup: EC-Earth)
  • NorESM (backup: GFDL-ESM)
  • to have a validation simulation and use different representative concentration pathways
  • ERA-Interim, RCP2.6 and RCP8.5
  • to be incrementally extended with further contributions by additional models/experiments

CORDEX CORE (25km) is extending CORDEX (50km) regional climate information.

Papers / Science

3 main papers coming out from the CORDEX core effort (and are encouraged to be used as further reference)

  • evaluation of mean climate and projections
  • evaluation of extreme climate and projection
  • evaluation of hazard and projections

We encourage the use of CORDEX CORE for any scientific studies by the entire CORDEX  research community.

Data Policy:
we strongly encourage people using the data from the CORDEX-CORE database to contact the model data producers in order to give feedback on the model simulations, interact on the scientific studies and/or propose co-authorships.

Further information can be found here:
http://www.cordex.org/experiment-guidelines/cordex-core/

Please let us know if you have further questions or concerns,

Armelle Remedio, Claas Teichmann and Erika Coppola