Highlights from the Polar CORDEX Annual meeting

The Polar CORDEX community held another great meeting this year, and this time in Potsdam! There was a good mix of presentations on the latest scientific and modelling advances in the Arctic and Antarctic.
A highlight from this year’s meeting was the development of an ensemble of RCM downscalings of two CMIP6 models over the Arctic CORDEX and Antarctic CORDEX domains. Initial results on model performance shows great potential for the ensemble and it is expected that there will be more exciting results from this ensemble at next year’s meeting. Work is now underway to publish the data on ESGF nodes. Other highlights from our meeting include progress on existing model intercomparison studies and plans for future studies.
It was announced at this year’s meeting that Annette Rinke (AWI) will be resigning from her role as coordinator of Polar CORDEX. Annette has been a coordinator of Polar CORDEX since its inception in 2013. She and her fellow coordinators, John Cassano (CU Boulder) and Andrew Orr (UKRI-BAS), have built a vibrant and strong Polar CORDEX community. The community is very grateful to Annette for her tireless work coordinating and leading our downscaling activities. At the meeting, we were also delighted to announce that Priscilla A. Mooney (NORCE, Bjerknes Centre) will join the coordination team and we look forward to continuing the success of Polar CORDEX with the new coordination team.
Many thanks to all our participants for sharing their excellent work and knowledge with the community, and a very special thanks to Annette Rinke and her colleagues at AWI for hosting us.

Call for proposals to host the CORDEX International Project Office

The World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) is opening a call for proposals to host the International project office of CORDEX.

The Host Institution will significantly benefit from hosting the CORDEX IPO by having a close interaction with this critical domain of research in support of regional downscaling experiments. It will serve as a great opportunity for the host to help deliver the exciting new goals of CORDEX to the international community.

The CORDEX IPO is currently and since 10 years hosted by the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI) in Norrköping, Sweden and it is now time for someone else to take on this important role. WCRP is seeking applications from institutions willing to host the CORDEX IPO from mid 2025 onward.

More information about the call can be found at the WCRP website.

The deadline for proposals is 28 February 2025.

All communications and enquiries regarding this call should be directed in English to Maureen Wanzala (mwanzala@wmo.int) in the WCRP Secretariat.

FPS workshop in Mexico coming up soon!

The 2nd Workshop of the Flagship Pilot Study (FPS) “Dynamical Downscaling Experiments and Hydrological Modelling for Canada and Mexico” will be held at the Centro del Cambio Global y la Sustentabilidad (CCGS) in Villahermosa, Tabasco, Mexico, on November 12-13, 2024.
This FPS focuses on conducting dynamical downscaling experiments for North America—encompassing Mexico, the United States, and Canada—using two of the CMIP6 Earth System Models (ESMs) identified as having the best performance for these regions, based on statistical metrics (Colorado et al., 2018). These ESMs will force the RegCM and WRF models, and their capabilities will be evaluated. Additionally, the FPS will present some results related to the statistical downscaling of CMIP6 models, particularly for southern and southeastern Mexico (Andrade-Velázquez & Montero-Martínez, 2023a, 2023b; Andrade-Velázquez et al., in press).
The objectives of the workshop include providing an update on the project’s current status and outlining the activities necessary to complete it. An open session with local stakeholders will also be held. The event will feature presentations from participants and interactive discussions among the three key groups: dynamical downscaling, statistical downscaling, and hydrology. There will be ample opportunity for open dialogue, focusing on internal communication, project milestones, and strategies for achieving them. Information on data, software, and products will also be shared.
For more details on this FPS, please visit their page.
A report from the workshop will be provided aftet the event.

Follow up FPS Extreme precipitation events in South-eastern South America meeting

During the Pan American Meteorological Conference (CPAM 2024) at the University of São Paulo in Brazil 19-23 August 2024 the Flagship Pilot Study (FPS) Extreme precipitation events in South-eastern South America (SESA) had a parallel meeting. The aim of the activity was to follow up on the FPS-SESA studies and to keep the work dynamics and collaboration network active. The CPAM is the largest conference in South America during 2024 and it was a great opportunity to share the FPS-SESA activities with the South American climate research community and to network.

13 participants, most of them from Argentina and Brazil, attended the meeting. Seven of them attended in person and six attended remotely including some participants from Spain and Italy.

The two-day activity was held from 21-22 August. The first day was dedicated to sharing and discussing results from the FPS-SESA initiative. Presentations of the ongoing analyses of the FPS-SESA and discussions on the degree of progress of the work were performed in the current six topics. Organization of the work and pending issues were discussed.
The second day was dedicated to advancing the structure of the publications based on the discussions during the previous day. A discussion on future collaborative research and coordinated activities was also conducted.

The main outcomes were that the topics discussed will be prepared as manuscripts to be submitted for publication in the following months. Additional calculations will be performed in order to deepen some of the analyses planned and one additional non-convection permitting simulation (at 20 km) will be conducted by the University of São Paulo group, in order to address the analysis of the added value of convection-permitting simulations in the FPS-SESA experiment.

The Flagship Pilot Study SESA started in 2017 and the main objectives of the SESA has been to study multi-scale processes and interactions (convection, local, regional and remote processes, including the co-behaviour of processes) that result in these extreme precipitation events; and to develop actionable climate information from multiple sources (statistical and dynamical downscaling products) based on co-production with the impact and user community.

You can read more about the FPS SESA here.

CORDEX MAIRS-Future Earth joint workshop on Science-Impacts-Society and Multi-scale Climate-Air-Water Nexus for Sustainable Health, Food, and Energy

CORDEX and Monsoon Asia Integrated Research for Sustainability-Future Earth (MAIRS-FE) have earlier jointly co-organized workshops to enhance the information exchange, learning and collaboration across science disciplines in the Asia region. The next step in this collaborative effort is to organize a workshop which will take place in Beijing at PKU on 17-18 October.

The overall topic for the collaboration is on Science-Impacts-Society and Multi-scale Climate-Air-Water Nexus for Sustainable Health, Food, and Energy. For this particular workshop we will have specific emphasis on how climate change is related to air quality and water scarcity/abundance, which would consequently pose threats to public health and food and energy security. Here is the agenda including the Zoom-link for online participation.

thumbnail of Final agenda

Prior to this workshop the Scientific Forum for Numerical Simulation of Asian Regional Climate Change and Earth System Process will be held at the Suzhou Campus of Nanjing University. 14-16 October. CORDEX is co-hosting and several representatives from CORDEX will be attending the event. Read more about the Forum here.

CARE for SEA Megacities and CORDEX-SEA: A Special Session

thumbnail of Announcement CARE for SEA_Nov.2024

Following the training workshop on empirical statistical downscaling (ESD) and urban climate
downscaling in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia last May 2024, there will be a special session for CARE
for SEA megacities and CORDEX-SEA on 26-28 November 2024, as part of “The 4th International
Vietnam Conference on Earth and Environmental Sciences (iVCEES-2024)” to be held in Quy
Nhon, Vietnam. Read more about the session, how to submit an abstract and how to register here

This workshop aims:
to coordinate and discuss updates on the empirical statistical downscaling (ESD), and
land surface physics-based downscaling (LSP-DS) activities under the CARE for SEA
megacities project;
to coordinate and discuss updates on the CMIP6 downscaling activities of CORDEX-SEA
and identify opportunities for collaboration with similar initiatives in Southeast Asia; and
to provide a platform for engagement between climate researchers and stakeholders.

Read more about the session, how to submit an abstract and how to register in the pdf above or at the conference website.