The latest version of the Rossby Centre Regional Climate Model - RCA4, developed at the Rossby Centre, has been used to downscale a subset of Global Climate Models (GCMs) simulations from the 5th Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5). Future climate projections from nine CMIP5 GCMs, under both the RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 scenarios, have been downscaled in different combinations over 6 of 13 CORDEX domains: Africa, Europe, Arctic, Middle East and North Africa (MENA), South Asia and South America. One RCP2.6 scenario from EC-EARTH has also been downscaled for the 6 CORDEX domains chosen.
Most of the Rossby Centre CORDEX simulations are performed at 0.44º resolution, recommended by the CORDEX experiment design to be completed first. For this reference resolution, the Euro-CORDEX ensemble (9 GCMs downscaled) and the Africa-CORDEX ensemble (8 GCMs downscaled) are the largest ensembles of transient (1951-2100) regional climate simulations ever produced by one regional models driven by different GCMs. In addition to the reference 0.44º resolution 5 GCMs were selected for downscaling over the Euro-CORDEX domain at unprecedentedly high spatial resolution - 0.11º and 2 GCMs for downscaling over the MENA-CORDEX domain at 0.22º. Such very high resolution simulations can provide more small-scale details necessary for impact and adaption studies at regional scales; for example in regions with complex topography and/or coast line. CORDEX activities at the Rossby Centre have resulted in a total of 115 regional simulations over 6 selected CORDEX domains and 3 different resolutions, which are listed in Table 1 and illustrated in Figure 1 below.
The full Africa-CORDEX ensemble (26 simulations) has been already published on the Swedish ESGF data node and is freely accessible to all interested users. In coming weeks, and up until the end of 2013, all Rossby Centre CORDEX simulations shown in Table 1 and Figure 1, will be published on this data node. The publishing was possible thanks to support from the IS-ENES2 FP7 project and the published simulations are also visible, or will shortly be visible, on other IS-ENES2 European datanodes: http://esgf-data.dkrz.de/, http://esgf-index1.ceda.ac.uk, http://cordexesg.dmi.dk/ and http://esgf-node.ipsl.fr.
List of CMIP5 GCMs used
- CanESM2 (Canada)
- CNRM-CM5 (France)
- IPSL-CM5A-MR (France)
- HadGEM2-ES (UK)
- NorESM1-M (Norway)
- EC-EARTH (European consortium), MIROC5 (Japan)
- GFDL-ESM2M (USA)
- MPI-ESM-LR (Germany)
References
Jones C, F. Giorgi and G. Asrar, 2011: The Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment: CORDEX, An international downscaling link to CMIP5: CLIVAR Exchanges, No. 56, Vol 16, No.2 pages 34-40. Available from
http://www.clivar.org/sites/default/files/imported/publications/exchanges/Exchanges_56.pdf
List of acronyms
CORDEX - Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment
CMIP5 ¬ Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5
GCM – Global Climate Model
ERAINT – ERA-Interim Reanalysis
ESGF – Earth System Grid Federation
IS-ENES2 - Infrastructure for the European Network of Earth System Modelling, Phase 2.