New Chair and Vice-chair of the WCRP JSC

Professor Tim Naish (New Zealand) and Professor Cristiana Stan (USA) have been elected as the Chair and Vice-chair of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) Joint Scientific Committee (JSC).

The elections for the two positions concluded on 27 January 2025. Read more about the new Chair and Vice-chair at the WCRP website.

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.

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.

The 8th Med-CORDEX workshop successfully held

The 8th international Med-CORDEX Workshop, locally organised by Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development (ENEA) in Rome, Italy, was a successful event. During the three days, 14-16 May 2024, about 60 participants attended onsite and some invited speakers participated online.

One of the CORDEX co-chairs, Daniela Jacob, gave a CORDEX overview online talk on the first day. There were also online talks from invited speakers Robert Vautard (IPCC-WGI co-chair) and Bart van den Hurk (IPCC-WGII co-chair).

On top of the presentations and discussions on coupled CORDEX-CMIP6 baseline runs in Med-CORDEX, there were also more original sessions such as Impact session including coastal risks and coastal cities and the Session on biogeochemical modelling.

You can read more about Med-CORDEX on their website: https://www.medcordex.eu/index.php/

CORDEX SEA: CARE for SEA megacities – inception workshop and stakeholder consultation

The “Climatic hazard Assessment to enhance Resilience against climate Extremes for Southeast Asian megacities (CARE for SEA megacities)” project is the latest activity under the Southeast Asia Regional Climate Downscaling / Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment Southeast Asia (SEACLID / CORDEX-SEA) collaboration.

An inception workshop and stakeholder consultation was held in Bangkok, Thailand in November 2023. You can read the full report from the workshop here:

thumbnail of CARE_for_SEA_megacities_workshop_summary

Outcomes from the first CORDEX workshop in Central Asia

The CORDEX Workshop Climate Data Analyses and Downscaling took place at Samarkand State University, Samarkand, Uzbekistan, on 27-29 November 2023. 42 participants attended, most of them from Uzbekistan.
The aim of the workshop was to contribute to capacity building and promote climate resilience among the participants. In Central Asia there are limited activities related to CORDEX, despite the significant potential it holds for climate change research and climate downscaling in the context of regional models.

– We found a very active group of researchers who are interested in collaborating with us for the future CORDEX activities, says Shaukat Ali, Point of Contact for the CORDEX Central Asia domain and one of the main organizers of the workshop.

The workshop contained both talks and seminars that focused on the CMIP and CORDEX datasets, as well as the processing and interpretation of these datasets.

The participants received a demo of regional climate models and were trained on:

– CORDEX data downloading, data analysis using Climate Data Operators (CDO) and Grid Analysis and Display System (GrADS)
– the use of CORDEX data for the impact studies, especially extreme events and climate change and health
– how to communicate their science to policy.

Participants were particularly engaged with three talks: “An Introduction to the Climate System” by Michelle Reboita, “Extreme Precipitation Events in South-eastern South America: From Observation to Modeling,” an online presentation by Maria Laura Bertolli (contact person for South America CORDEX), and “Science-to-Policy Communication: Practical” by Shaukat Ali. The participants also showed specific interest in the GrADS section, especially when maps using CMIP and CORDEX data were displayed.

 

The talks and tutorials provided by Michelle Reboita are available at:

Reboita, M. (2023, November 19). Introduction to the Climate System. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10157716

Reboita, M., & Ali, S. (2023, November 19). How can we download CMIP and CORDEX datasets?.v2. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10157641

During the group discussions on the last day it was decided to work towards joint projects on research papers and plan for future workshops within the domain.

Related articles:

Projections of wind power density in Pakistan and adjacent regions

https://www.int-res.com/articles/cr2021/85/c085p177.pdf

21st century precipitation and monsoonal shift over Pakistan and Upper Indus Basin (UIB) using high-resolution projections

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0048969721042121