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Call for Action 07 - Climate modelling, scenarios and downscaling

RELATED ONGOING WORK
Examples in alphabetical order

  • The Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (CCCCC) is coordinating regional efforts in applying PRECIS to the Caribbean through the UK Met Office Hadley Centre, INSMET (Cuba) and University of West Indies (Barbados and Jamaica), and has been sharing its experiences with the Central American regions through CATHALAC. CCCCC also undertakes capacity building through regional and national trainings.

  • Frontier Research Center for Global Change (FRCGC) of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) has developed a 20 km horizontal resolution global atmospheric model using the Earth Simulator in order to project regionally-detailed climate conditions such as: increased strength of typhoons and hurricanes, extreme weather events (e.g. droughts, heat and cold waves) and diurnal precipitation change. This has been applied to a number of adaptation studies in the Caribbean and Latin America.

  • The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) TGICA provides climate modelling, scenarios and downscaling; a comprehensive archive of variables which are relevant to impact and adaptation work from IPCC climate change projections, and user support to ensure proper use of data, including through three Data Distribution Centres (BADC (UK), DKRZ (Germany) and CIESIN (USA).
  • The Met Office Hadley Centre has been producing detailed climate scenarios using the PRECIS tool for the main developing country regions. Their activities include:
    • basic capacity building and technology transfer via scientific and technical support for installing and applying PRECIS to scenario development in the region, ad hoc advice on using scenarios in impacts assessments, and engaging regional climate centres into a process of sharing experiences, financial resources and results.
    • The PRECIS-Caribbean initiative provides high-resolution climate projections that have been made available online by INSMET.

  • The United Nations Development Program is downscaling GCMs to generate country-level adaptation profiles of past and future climate trends, using MAGIC/SCENGEN scenarios. Results have been made available in a stand-alone publication and through the adaptation learning mechanism, some preliminary results have been used for case studies as part of the HDR 2007/2008.

  • USAID have developed the SERVIR tool which maps long-term global climate projections as well as historical data at regional scales and below. USAID havealso establisheda SERVIR hub for Africa.

  • The United States supports various IPPC AR4 downscaling activities:
    • the Famine Early Warning System (FEWS) for eastern and for southern Africa to better understand long-term food needs;
    • the Central Valley Biological Assessment 2030 time horizon for addressing impacts to fish populations in California;
    • reconciling projections of future Colorado River Stream Flow, with the goal of conveying to policy and decision maker the nature of the uncertainties associated with the information being provided; downscaling projections of Indian monsoon rainfall using a statistical method (nonhomogeneous hidden Markov model).
    The United States also supports capacity building exercises, including through better educating future users of climate information and decision-makers as well as enhancing regional cooperation.

  • The World Climate Research Program supports research for improved climate predictions and understanding of human influence on climate, and creates scientific knowledge to assess the impacts of climate change and variability. They have organized global model runs for all IPCC assessments (e.g. PCMDI archive) with open access for use for climate science and regional projections (WG 1) and impact assessments (WG 2 & 3). They also conduct training seminars and workshops on the use of model outputs and seasonal forecasting.