| Session Details | |
| Section | AS - Atmospheric Sciences |
| Session Title | Regional Climate Downscaling and CORDEX: Challenges and Prospects |
| Main Convener | Dr. Hyun-Suk Kang (Korea Meteorological Administration, Korea, South) |
| Co-convener(s) | Dr. Satyaban B. Ratna (University of East Anglia, United Kingdom) Prof. Fredolin T. Tangang (National University of Malaysia, Malaysia) Dr. Xianxiang Li (Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology, Singapore) Prof. Jason Evans (University of New South Wales, Australia) |
| Session Description | There have been significant efforts for a few decades on regional downscaling to aim for producing regional and/or local climate projection as well as expanding scientific understanding on climate processes. In this context, a recent WCRP major project, Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX) provides a common framework that consists of 14 continental-scale domains, in which four initiatives belongs to Australasia: CORDEX-South Asia, East Asia, Southeast Asia, and Australia. This region needs to be considered with caution and in- depth, both in geographical and climatological perspectives, because it covers very unique and complex climatological phenomena. These include: the most complex orography with the highest plateau in the world; the strongest monsoon areas including Indian, East Asian, Northwest Pacific, and Australian monsoons; the strongest convection in the tropical maritime continents; the strongest tropical cyclones activities; and even both the northern and southern Hemisphere. Despite of the successful achievements made by CORDEX-Asia communities, we still need many issues to be addressed such as coupling ocean-atmosphere, climate-vegetation, climate-aerosols, and other climate processes. In addition, statistical/empirical regional climate downscaling approaches have received increasing attention by stakeholders in the regions. Hence, this session invites scientists within and outside the CORDEX initiatives to share their scientific findings on various issues related to dynamical and statistical/empirical regional climate downscaling methods. This session covers following themes: 1) Evaluation of regional downscaling techniques (dynamical and statistical methods), 2) Development of coupled regional climate model, 3) Added-values in regional climate downscaling by comparison with high-quality observation datasets, 4) Process-based studies on sensitivity to the large-scale forcing, regional forcing, domain size, resolution, physics, and etc., 5) Regional climate projection and understanding on climate sensitivity, and finally 6) Other issues relevant to regional climate downscaling including application to application sectors. |