The CORDEX-CORE EXP-I Initiative: Description and Highlight Results from the Initial Analysis

Abstract

We describe the first effort within the Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment - Coordinated Output for Regional Evaluation, or CORDEX-CORE EXP-I. It consists of a set of 21st century projections with two regional climate models (RCMs) downscaling three global climate model (GCM) simulations from the CMIP5 program, for two greenhouse gas concentration pathways (RCP8.5 and RCP2.6), over 9 CORDEX domains at ~25 km grid spacing. Illustrative examples from the initial analysis of this ensemble are presented, covering a wide range of topics, such as added value of RCM nesting, extreme indices, tropical and extratropical storms, monsoons, ENSO, severe storm environments, emergence of change signals, energy production. They show that the CORDEX-CORE EXP-I ensemble can provide downscaled information of unprecedented comprehensiveness to increase understanding of processes relevant for regional climate change and impacts, and to assess the added value of RCMs. The CORDEX-CORE EXP-I dataset, which will be incrementally augmented with new simulations, is intended to be a public resource available to the scientific and end-user communities for application to process studies, impacts on different socioeconomic sectors and climate service activities. The future of the CORDEX-CORE initiative is also discussed.

The impact of climate change on photovoltaic power potential in Southwestern Colombia

“…Different studies have demonstrated the accuracy of CORDEX-CORE models in providing consistent and high-resolution regional climate change projections [22] , [23] . These models have also been used to assess the impact of climate change on renewable energies [24] .…”

Compound Events in South America Using the CORDEX‐CORE Ensemble: Current Climate Conditions and Future Projections in a Global Warming Scenario

“…The CCS from the ESMs was generally well‐conserved by the RCMs, as they tended to present similar change rates but with some differences in specific regions. RegCM often depicted less changes than REMO—like in the case of coincident HW + DS over central and southeastern SA—whereas within the driving ESMs, NorESM1‐M—which is considered of low climate sensitivity (Giorgi et al., 2022)—and its corresponding RCMs also tended to show a more reduced pattern of changes. Recall that these high‐resolution models mainly inherit this signal from their driving data, although they can introduce some differentiated changes due to their ability to reproduce more sophisticated physical processes (Ambrizzi et al., 2018).…”

The Worldwide C3S CORDEX Grand Ensemble: A Major Contribution to Assess Regional Climate Change in the IPCC AR6 Atlas

“…Most of the simulations indicated in this table under the "22" resolution label correspond to the CORDEX-CORE initiative (Coppola et al, 2021b;Giorgi et al, 2022;Gutowski Jr. et al, 2016;Teichmann et al, 2021), designed to provide homogeneous regional climate projections for most of the inhabited land regions using nine of the CORDEX domains (Figure 1a) at 0.22° resolution: North America (NAM), Central America (CAM), South America (SAM), Europe (EUR), Africa (AFR), South Asia (WAS), East Asia (EAS), Southeast Asia (SEA), and Australasia (AUS). Due to the high computational requirements, only three GCMs were selected to provide boundary conditions, representing high, medium, and low (HadGEM-ES, MPI-ESM-LR/MPI-ESM-MR, and NCC-NorESM, respectively) climate sensitivity in the CMIP5 ensemble at a global scale (using MIROC5, EC-Earth, GFDL-ES2M, respectively, as an alternative in some domains).…”

“…However, at an early stage in the preparation of the Working Group I (WGI) contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) in 2019, data availability on ESGF was patchy and heterogeneous across domains. This spatial heterogeneity was partially alleviated by the CORDEX-CORE initiative (Coppola et al, 2021b;Giorgi et al, 2022;Gutowski Jr. et al, 2016;Remedio et al, 2019;Teichmann et al, 2021), providing homogeneous future regional climate projections across most domains at ~25 km resolution for a few RCMs nested into a number of selected driving GCMs. However, in spite of this massive community effort, the publicly available ensembles from the ESGF were too small in some domains.…”