News

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

The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), Met Office and CORDEX South Asia organized the training workshop Regional climate change projections: Climate change analysis using CORDEX regional climate models over South Asia, online during 12-14 October 2020 and 19-21 October 2020.

The training was part of an institutional capacity building approach with the intention to strengthen the knowledge and capabilities on how to access and analyze future climate change projections. Through dedicated hands-on exercises, resource persons from ICIMOD, the Met Office – UK, and the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) – Pune, guided participants in using different open source tools to analyse and visualize climate change projections at different time scales for user-specified locations. The event brought together participants from four focus countries – Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan. The 25 participants, including 8 women, were primarily from national hydro-meteorological agencies.

Preparations and arrangement

The training that originally was planned to be held in-person was scaled down due to the COVID-19 pandemic to meet the practicalities of an online training.

Good preparations and great effort ensured that the training proceeded as smoothly as possible, for instance all the participants installed the required software before the training commenced. The virtual platform allowed participants to engage and interact with each other. The organizers maintained a daily log for all participants, which facilitated the communication between the organizers and the participants and enabled quick support when needed. Additionally, the organizers recorded the training and made them available on the workshop platform, enabling participants to view and review the sessions.

Outcome

Through this training the participants improved their understanding of climate change science and projection and have learnt how to access and analyze CORDEX datasets using R software. They also practiced how to understand and interpret the characteristics of climate change data and analysis in a ‘hands-on’ fashion in combination with theoretical sessions. The participants found the sessions on how to use R to analyze and visualize CORDEX datasets particularly useful, and were also provided with customized R scripts for future use.

This was a very technical training and there were some challenges, mostly due to problems with internet connectivity in some countries. Despite that the general opinion was that the training was very valuable. For instance, one participant is planning to use CORDEX data for his PhD research on the impacts of climate change in the agricultural sector.

Future plans – more to come

This first training will be followed by a series of training activities during 2021 and 2022 to build the capacities of individuals at targeted institutions. The goal is to develop the individual skills and knowledge, and thus also the institutional capacity, to analyze climate projections and produce climate information for use in different sectoral applications. This initial online training has created a foundation and lead to useful insights for the future trainings. As a follow up to this training the organizers are planning to host a face to face training, using new analytical tools to analyze climate change projections over areas of interest and for specific applications when possible considering the COVID-19 pandemic. The plan is to organize hands-on exercises in-person with the participants.

Read more about the event at the workshop website:

https://www.icimod.org/event/regional-climate-change-projections-cordex/

EURO-CORDEX is organizing the annual General Assembly that will be held online between 25-29 January 2021 to discuss the outcome of the last meeting and the future plans.

Read more about EURO-CORDEX: https://euro-cordex.net/index.php.en

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year
from the CORDEX office
and our precious extra help!

In our newsletter, you can for instance read about new FPS proposals, a book on assessment of climate change in the Indian region, and how to submit your CORDEX publication at the website. We are also happy to report about the CORDEX workshops that have been able to be held, all of them online.

CORDEX Newsletter November 2020

If you have something interesting that you would like us to include in our next newsletter please send us an email ipoc@cordex.org

The online workshop organized by CORDEX and MAIRS-FE on 9-10 November 2020 aimed to seek better collaboration between the organizers and also other relevant actors. During these two days potential partners discussed ideas and created a strong basis for the future cooperation.

Background

At the fourth International Conference on Regional Climate –CORDEX in Beijing in October 2019 a very promising cooperation between CORDEX and many Asian organizations/universities was initiated, including a side meeting co-organized by CORDEX and MAIRS-FE. This side event resulted in an agreement to collaborate on information exchange across science disciplines, to engage in transferring regional climate research results to policy and to jointly support that the academic community engages more effectively with policy-makers, decision-makers in the public and private sectors through the co-design, co-production and co-deliver principles.

Finding new forms for cooperation

The first day also included that the participants gave their feedback and shared their ideas on these issues, thereby laying a good ground for the next day’s discussions.

On the second day Linda Stevenson from APN and Ailikun from ANSO presented their organizations and their current focus, where climate change, extreme events and associated risks, water security, monsoons and capacity building are some of the important aspects. They both expressed their support for this initiative and acknowledged that it fits well within their respective focus areas.

The meeting proceeded with the director of MAIRS-FE, Tong Zhu and the CORDEX Science Advisory Team member, Fredolin Tangang, who presented the ideas for future collaboration, giving examples of common fields of interest such as air pollution and health risks, heatwaves/droughts and the implications for water resources and wildfires.

With the scene set by these presentations, the around 40 participants were divided into two groups. One group discussed water resources and more specifically; extreme precipitation, wildfire and drought. The other group discussed climate extremes/risks with focus on; climate change impact of air pollution and air quality, climate change related to health risks, risk management, emergency alerting and response.

Both groups agreed that capacity building and involving Early Career Researchers are essential for the cooperation and development. To work towards an end-to-end perspective, here equal to involving stakeholders/users from the beginning and addressing both assessment and applications, is a common goal.

Moving forward – next steps

This workshop created a strong basis for future cooperation. The next stage is to further define specific steps for this group in collaboration with relevant additional partners. If your organization/institute is interested in participating in this collaboration please contact one of the workshop organizers;

International Project Office for CORDEX: ipoc@cordex.org

MAIRS-FE, Wei Wan: wei.wan@pku.edu.cn

Fredolin Tangang: tangang@ukm.edu.my

Shuyu Wang: wsy@nju.edu.cn