| Session Details | |
| Section | AS - Atmospheric Sciences |
| Session Title | Regional Climate Downscaling and Cordex: Challenges and Prospects |
| Main Convener | Prof. Dong-Hyun Cha (Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, Korea, South) |
| Co-convener(s) | Dr. Hyun-Suk Kang (Korea Meteorological Administration, Korea, South) Prof. Jason Evans (University of New South Wales, Australia) Dr. Shuyu Wang (Nanjing University, China) Dr. Koji Dairaku (National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Resilience, Japan) |
| Session Description | The impacts of a changing climate, and the adaptation strategies required to deal with them, will occur on more regional and national scales. This is where regional climate downscaling has an important role to play by providing projections with much greater detail and more accurate representation of localised extreme events. 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 intrinsic and complex climatological phenomena. 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) Regional climate projection and understanding on climate sensitivity 3) Added-values in regional climate downscaling by comparison with high-quality observation datasets 4) Development of regional earth system model 5) Process-based studies on sensitivity to the large-scale forcing, regional forcing, domain size, resolution, physics, and etc. 6) Impact studies of regional anthropogenic forcings such as land-use change, aerosol, and urbanization. 7) Other issues relevant to regional climate downscaling including application to application sectors. |