There is a need to foster coordination of downscaling initiatives for the South America and Central America and the Caribbean regions (SAM/CAM), and to pursue capacity-building activities in the region. CORDEX has, by supporting this online workshop, participated in the creation of new teams in regional climate research, consisting of PhD students and early career researchers in the region. These networks have not existed before and thus the capacity within the region has been increased.

This workshop on 5-6 October 2021 was a continuation of the Online Paper-Writing Workshop on Regional Climate Modeling that CORDEX Central America and South America organized in November and December 2020. It was an online activity, which resulted effective for the activities planned in the workshop. The dynamic of the discussions was organized in presentations of each group and general discussions during plenary sessions.

Collaboration and networking in the SAM/CAM region

The overall goal of the first workshop was to promote collaborative activities and networking in the SAM/CAM regions with focus on specific regional climate phenomena with the aim of enhancing the capacity of PhD students and early career researchers in designing a research topic on regional climate modeling and documenting/writing the scientific results.

Planning submission of papers

The objectives for this year’s workshop were to discuss the advances and shortcomings of the work and to plan the submission of the papers. The 42 participants, 13 of them females, came mostly from the South and Central American region.

Before the follow up workshop the organizer sent out a survey to get feedback from the first workshop, to find out how the work had proceeded since then, what drawbacks the groups had encountered and what was most urgent to discuss during the workshop. Despite some drawbacks and issues with finding time for the project due to other commitments, the participants were generally pleased with the first workshop and the progress of their continued collaboration.

Feedback on eight upcoming papers

The main outcomes of this follow-up activity are enhanced collaboration of young scientists, discussion of scientific questions and methods, increased dialogue amongst scientists within the CAM/SAM regional community and enhanced use of CORDEX SAM and CAM data to climate change and impact studies in both regions.

Other outcomes are divulgation of CORDEX activities through the presentation of the main results of the paper in the RAUGM (Unión Geofísica Mexicana) 2021, Mexico, analysis of scientific topics and documenting results in scientific papers.

All 8 groups presented their work to each other and the organizers during the two-day follow up workshop, giving each other feedback. In the plenary sessions the participants discussed general issues and the organizers gave suggestions.

The titles of the papers are:

Paper 1: Extreme indices of temperature and precipitation in South America: trends and intercomparison of regional climate models.

Paper 2: Daily extreme indices of precipitation and temperature over the CAM domain: Trends and intercomparison of the CORDEX-CORE regional climate models.

Paper 3: Heat waves and fire in Pantanal: historical and future perspectives from CORDEX.

Paper 4: Extreme Climate indices associated with soy and maize yields over Latin America-Part I. An observational and modeling perspective.

Paper 5: Twenty-first century drought and heatwave projections in the CORDEX models over tropical South America.

Paper 6: The relationship between strong Caribbean Low-Level Jet events and vertically integrated moisture flux convergence, and its underlying mechanism.

Paper 7: Assessment of the RegCM4-CORDEX performance in simulating cyclones affecting the western South America coast.

Paper 8: Early-stages structure of extratropical cyclones over South America: RCM added value and future changes in a warmer planet.

A wish for more training workshops in the future

Some groups are at a writing stage and some have finalized the draft and revised it. The organizers have helped out with the revision and shared their expertise. The general idea is that the papers will be ready for submission by the end of 2021.

Almost 90% of the participants would like to have more training workshops in the future according to the answers from the survey. They also proposed many good suggestions for topics for future workshops!

More information at the workshop website

If you want to read more about the workshop, please have a look at the workshop website: http://www.cima.fcen.uba.ar/cordex-2020/