Santander Meteorology Group

A multidisciplinary approach for weather & climate

The COordinated Regional climate Downscaling EXperiment (CORDEX) is a framework aimed at improving coordination of international efforts in regional climate downscaling research. CORDEX was initiated as a result of the Task Force on Regional Climate Downscaling (RCD), auspiced by the World Climate Research Program (WCRP). This international initiative aims at providing a quality-controlled data set of RCD-based information sampling uncertainties in Regional Climate Change through an ensemble methodology based on the latest set of GCM climate scenarios and predictions produced within the 5th Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5). CORDEX defines a common set of domains and a standard set of output variables, frequency and format. One of the main goals of this initiative is to engage and coordinate the RCD community in its activities and discussions to provide a framework for model evaluation and assessment with the final aim to support and inform climate impact assessment and adaptation groups. The CORWES (CORDEX-WRF-ESpaña) proposal aims at contributing to the CORDEX international initiative by providing simulations over as many domains as possible and contributing to the model evaluation. In doing so, CORWES proposes research in the regional ocean-atmosphere coupling and the exploitation of geographically distributed computational resources to maximize the number of simulations. One of the main goals is the coordination of the spanish community using WRF for climate downscaling purposes, fostering the knowlegde and technology transfer among groups.

The Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model is the latest generation of mesoscale models developed at NCAR. It is an open-source model, in active development and with a wide community of users applying it for a wide range of applications including, among many others, regional climate downscaling. The WRF community planning to contribute to the CORDEX initiative is organized through the web site http://www.meteo.unican.es/wiki/cordexwrf, currently counting 15 groups from 11 countries worldwide. CORWES comprises the spanish groups of the CORDEX-WRF community and focuses on the following objectives:

1. Contribute basic CORDEX-compliant simulations for the key domain, Africa, coordinating and colaborating with the CORDEX-WRF and CORDEX communities.
2. Conduct research on the regional atmosphere-ocean coupling, assesing the role of the coupling on the climate change signal. The Regional Ocean Modelling System (ROMS) coupled to the WRF model will be used for this purpose.
3. Maximize the number of basic CORDEX-compliant simulations (several physical scheme configurations, domains, global models, scenarios, …) to be contributed to CORDEX considering geographically-distributed computer resources (GRID technology) using the WRF for GRID (WRF4G, http://www.meteo.unican.es/software/wrf4g) tool.
4. Tranfer technology and knowledge among the groups, and to the rest of the community, while developing diagnostic and formatting tools to be contributed as open source tools.