CORDEX Southeast Asia organized an outreach and capacity building workshop online 17 – 19 November 2020. Almost 200 participants attended the sessions. Most participants came from the Southeast Asian countries although some participants outside the region also participated including Australia, United States of America and South Asian countries.

The workshop consisted of one session each day during the three days. It was conducted without any technical issues, even though this was the first time it was held online and with such a large number of participants.

Outcome/Scientific highlights

Through this workshop the organizers managed to outreach CORDEX Southeast Asia and its achievements. The workshop highlighted the Southeast Asia Regional Climate Change Information System (SARCCIS), which serves as a one‑stop datacenter that:

1. a) freely disseminates high‑resolution, multi‑model and multi‑scenarios simulated data;
2. b) provides guidance on data usage and reliability, including uncertainty and;
3. c) conducts trainings to users on how to access, analyze and interpret the data

Another highlight was the progress on the 5 km simulations of CORDEX SEA over a number of key regions in Southeast Asia. Furthermore, the workshop provided capacity building/development on data retrieval, application and analysis that is important for the future work within this region.

The presentations

The first day was an introduction to CORDEX and CORDEX Data Applications in Southeast Asia also including a welcoming remark from Linda Stevenson from the Asian Pacific Network (APN).  Fredolin Tangang gave a presentation of CORDEX-SEA: High-resolution and multi-model climate change projections in Southeast Asia and Iréne Lake introduced the CORDEX programme and its importance. Presenters from the different Southeast Asian countries provided useful demonstrations of CORDEX data applications in their countries. There was time for questions and discussions at the end of each day.

The second session included, besides the presentation on SARCCIS, three technical presentations on CORDEX Data Retrieval, Analysis and Applications. The presenters from Sweden and South Africa gave an excellent overview of how to download and use CORDEX data.  The presentations provided useful information on technical issues related to data retrieval and CORDEX data application, especially for data users community from Southeast Asia.

The final day was dedicated to the Fourth Workshop of the Second Phase of Southeast Asia Regional Climate Downscaling (SEACLID)/CORDEX Southeast Asia Workshop where each Southeast Asian country presented their progress on the 5 km x 5 km regional climate downscaling on a number of subdomains within CORDEX Southeast Asia.

Future plans

There was also a discussion on how to move forward, including further coordination on the 5 km x 5 km simulations, coordinated analyses of simulated outputs, data archiving in SARCCIS, documentation of the results and a follow up workshop is scheduled for the middle of 2021. If possible, this workshop will be held in-person.

The workshop website: http://www.rucore.ru.ac.th/cordex_outreach