CORDEX Workshop

Today at ICTP marks the start of a series of three meetings that will pave the way for future work under the Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX) - a programme activity of the World Climate Research Programme's Working Group for Regional Climate. The two-day workshop will take the first steps toward assimilating the two different methods comprising the CORDEX project, which will vastly improve efforts in climate change projections for local regions that can cover between 100 and 200 square kilometers. 

"It has long been recognized that the impacts of climate change vary by region," says William Gutowski, Jr., a professor at Iowa State University who organized the workshop with Bruce Hewitson of the University of Cape Town (S. Africa), Rasmus Benestad of the Norwegian Meteorological Institute (Norway) and ICTP scientist Filippo Giorgi. "In order to measure those impacts, we must gather more local information in addition to global models," explains Gutowski who, along with Hewitson and Giorgi, helped the CORDEX Science Advisory Team in 2012 to further develop the project, foster an international team of experts and promote interaction and communication between scientists.

The two methods scientists apply using CORDEX data are Regional Climate Model simulations and Statistical Downscaling. Gutowski studies the former and Hewitson and Benestad the latter, which applies existing measurements of a region's temperature, humidity and other parameters that change with time to projection models based from statistical processing. Regional Climate Model simulations perform similar analysis but with different processing, which can lead to different results.

"Our goal for this workshop is to figure out how to bring people together and arrive at a common ground on how to understand the results from the two methods," Gutowski says.  

In this way, he and his colleagues can develop an idea of how climate change will effect different environments including farms, rain forests and prairies in the near and far future.

About 17 people are attending the workshop, which is by invitation only. They come from all regions of the globe including Asia, Australia, Europe and North America. Each participant is an expert in their field and the diversity of backgrounds they bring and represent will provide a useful variety of perspectives for moving forward, Gutowski says.

Part of today's activities will include an overview of recent CORDEX data and then participants will break up into discussion groups. The discussion groups will comprise the majority of the rest of the workshop and, Gutowski hopes, will develop a plan of action for figuring out how to compare and contrast the two methods side-by-side.

"Another goal of CORDEX, and part of the reason we held the workshop at ICTP, is to promote the development of climate science in developing countries," Gutowski says.

ICTP'S Earth System Physics section recently upgraded its regional climate modelling system allowing scientists to run larger, longer simulations. In 2012, ESP applied the upgraded model - version 4.3 of their RegCM4 - to work within the framework of the CORDEX project. They ran 33 different climate scenarios for five different regions (Africa, Mediterranean, South America, Central America and South Asia), the results of which they hope to publish within the next year.

CORDEX is a global effort including scientists and institutions based on every continent, including Antarctica.