The Institute of Physics of Cantabria has contributed to this project, coordinating the provision of data for global domains
28th May 2021
Simulating
the future climate at a regional level, the Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX)
climate projections cover almost all of the world’s landmass
through 14 geographical domains. As of today, data for all domains
are available in the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S*) Climate
Data Store (CDS). The Instituto de Física de Cantabria (IFCA-CSIC) has contributed to this project, coordinating data provision for worldwide domains.
Projections
of how Earth’s climate may change in the future are based on Global
and Regional Climate Models, that generally provide low-resolution
information. To adapt to climate change on regional and national
levels, we need climate information with a much higher resolution,
and consequently more detail. Combining
these outputs with more detailed local information, the Regional
Climate Models
provide
more detailed climate projections that are a better representation of
local events and environments. CORDEX is advancing and coordinating
the science and application of RCMs through global partnerships.
The
CORDEX projections are informing the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment
Report, which is due to be published during 2021 and 2022. In
particular, they are being used for the Atlas chapter and
specifically the new Interactive Atlas, which will allow users to
explore and visualise different global and regional climate
projections.
IFCA has coordinated one of the contracts, responsible for the curation and consolidation for twelve worldwide domains (North America, Central America, South America, Africa, East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Australasia, Arctic and Antarctica) with the participation of IPSL (Fance), SMHI (Sweden), and Predicita (a SME Spanish company spin-off of IFCA with long experience in COPERNICUS). This activity has been done in collaboration with the Department of Applied Mathematics and Computational Sciences of Universidad de Cantabria, as part of the activities in the Affiliated IFCA Unit.
C3S has supported the curation and quality control of some of the simulations for the CORDEX domains, and funded new simulations for the European region. The CORDEX projections are also informing the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). One of C3S’ major contributions was curating climate simulations from different producers around the world that were not previously available for the public. For the European domain, C3S funded additional climate simulations, resulting in projections of the region’s future climate now being based on more models and simulations than ever before.
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