COSMO-CLM regional climate simulations in the Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX) framework: a review

In the last decade, the Climate Limited-area Modeling Community (CLM-Community) has contributed to the Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX) with an extensive set of regional climate simulations. Using several versions of the COSMO-CLM-Community model, ERA-Interim reanalysis and eight global climate models from phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) were dynamically downscaled with horizontal grid spacings of 0.44∘ (∼ 50 km), 0.22∘ (∼ 25 km), and 0.11∘ (∼ 12 km) over the CORDEX domains Europe, South Asia, East Asia, Australasia, and Africa. This major effort resulted in 80 regional climate simulations publicly available through the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) web portals for use in impact studies and climate scenario assessments. Here we review the production of these simulations and assess their results in terms of mean near-surface temperature and precipitation to aid the future design of the COSMO-CLM model simulations. It is found that a domain-specific parameter tuning is beneficial, while increasing horizontal model resolution (from 50 to 25 or 12 km grid spacing) alone does not always improve the performance of the simulation. Moreover, the COSMO-CLM performance depends on the driving data. This is generally more important than the dependence on horizontal resolution, model version, and configuration. Our results emphasize the importance of performing regional climate projections in a coordinated way, where guidance from both the global (GCM) and regional (RCM) climate modeling communities is needed to increase the reliability of the GCM–RCM modeling chain.

The CORDEX‐Australasia ensemble: evaluation and future projections

<p>The World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) has an international initiative called the COordinated Regional climate Downscaling EXperiment (CORDEX). The goal of the initiative is to provide regionally downscaled climate projections for most land regions of the globe, as a compliment to the global climate model projections performed within the Coupled Model Intercomparison Projects (CMIP). CORDEX includes data from both dynamical and statistical downscaling. It is anticipated that the CORDEX dataset will provide a link to the impacts and adaptation community through its better resolution and regional focus. Participation in CORDEX is open and any researchers performing climate downscaling are encourage to engage with the initiative. Here I present the current status, <span>evaluation and future projections</span> for the CORDEX-AustralAsia <span>ensemble</span>.</p><p>The CORDEX-Australasia ensemble is the largest regional climate projection ensemble ever created for the region. It is a 20-member ensemble made by 6 regional climate models downscaling 11 global climate models. Overall the ensemble produces a good representation of recent climate. Consistent biases within the ensemble include an underestimation of the diurnal temperature range and an underestimation of precipitation across much of southern Australia. Under a high emissions scenario projected temperature changes by the end of the twenty-first century reach ~ 5 K in the interior of Australia with smaller increases found toward the coast. Projected precipitation changes are towards drying, particularly in the most populated areas of the southwest and southeast of the continent. The projected precipitation change is very seasonal with summer projected to see little change leaning toward an increase. These results provide a foundation enabling future studies of regional climate changes, climate change impacts, and adaptation options for Australia.</p>

A Climate Downscaling Deep Learning Model considering the Multiscale Spatial Correlations and Chaos of Meteorological Events

Climate downscaling is a way to provide finer resolution data at local scales, which has been widely used in meteorological research. The two main approaches for climate downscaling are dynamical and statistical. The traditional dynamical downscaling methods are quite time- and resource-consuming based on general circulation models (GCMs). Recently, more and more researchers construct a statistical deep learning model for climate downscaling motivated by the single-image superresolution (SISR) process in computer vision (CV). This is an approach that uses historical climate observations to learn a low-resolution to high-resolution mapping and produces great enhancements in terms of efficiency and effectiveness. Therefore, it has provided an appreciable new insight and successful downscaling solution to multiple climate phenomena. However, most existing models only make a simple analogy between climate downscaling and SISR and ignore the underlying dynamical mechanisms, which leads to the overaveraged downscaling results lacking crucial physical details. In this paper, we incorporate the a priori meteorological knowledge into a deep learning formalization for climate downscaling. More specifically, we consider the multiscale spatial correlations and the chaos in multiple climate events. Depending on two characteristics, we build up a two-stage deep learning model containing a stepwise reconstruction process and ensemble inference, which is named climate downscaling network (CDN). It can extract more local/remote spatial dependencies and provide more comprehensive captures of extreme conditions. We evaluate our model based on two datasets: climate science dataset (CSD) and benchmark image dataset (BID). The results demonstrate that our model shows the effectiveness and superiority in downscaling daily precipitation data from 2.5 degrees to 0.5 degrees over Asia and Europe. In addition, our model exhibits better performance than the other traditional approaches and state-of-the-art deep learning models.

Deep-learning based climate downscaling using the super-resolution method: a case study over the western US

Demand for high-resolution climate information is growing rapidly to fulfill the needs of both scientists and stakeholders. However, deriving high-quality fine-resolution information is still challenging due to either the complexity of a dynamical climate model or the uncertainty of an empirical statistical model. In this work, a new downscaling framework is developed using the deep-learning based super-resolution method to generate very high-resolution output from coarse-resolution input. The modeling framework has been trained, tested, and validated for generating high-resolution (here, 4 km) climate data focusing on temperature and precipitation at daily scale from the year 1981 to 2010. This newly designed downscaling framework is composed of multiple convolutional layers involving batch normalization, rectification-linear unit, and skip connection strategies, with different loss functions explored. The overall logic for this modeling framework is to learn optimal parameters from the training data for later-on prediction applications. This new method and framework is found to largely reduce the time and computation cost (~ 23 milliseconds for one-day inference) for climate downscaling compared to current downscaling strategies. The strength and limitation of this deep-learning based downscaling have been investigated and evaluated using both fine-scale gridded observations and dynamical downscaling data from regional climate models. The performance of this deep-learning framework is found to be competitive in either generating the spatial details or maintaining the temporal evolutions at a very fine grid-scale. It is promising that this deep-learning based downscaling method can be a powerful and effective way to retrieve fine-scale climate information from other coarse-resolution climate data. When seeking an efficient and affordable way for intensive climate downscaling, an optimized convolution neural network framework like the one explored here could be an alternative option and applied to a broad relevant application.

Regional Dynamical Downscaling

Dynamical downscaling has been used for about 30 years to produce high-resolution climate information for studies of regional climate processes and for the production of climate information usable for vulnerability, impact assessment and adaptation studies. Three dynamical downscaling tools are available in the literature: high-resolution global atmospheric models (HIRGCMs), variable resolution global atmospheric models (VARGCMs), and regional climate models (RCMs). These techniques share their basic principles, but have different underlying assumptions, advantages and limitations. They have undergone a tremendous growth in the last decades, especially RCMs, to the point that they are considered fundamental tools in climate change research. Major intercomparison programs have been implemented over the years, culminating in the Coordinated Regional climate Downscaling EXperiment (CORDEX), an international program aimed at producing fine scale regional climate information based on multi-model and multi-technique approaches. These intercomparison projects have lead to an increasing understanding of fundamental issues in climate downscaling and in the potential of downscaling techniques to provide actionable climate change information. Yet some open issues remain, most notably that of the added value of downscaling, which are the focus of substantial current research. One of the primary future directions in dynamical downscaling is the development of fully coupled regional earth system models including multiple components, such as the atmosphere, the oceans, the biosphere and the chemosphere. Within this context, dynamical downscaling models offer optimal testbeds to incorporate the human component in a fully interactive way. Another main future research direction is the transition to models running at convection-permitting scales, order of 1–3 km, for climate applications. This is a major modeling step which will require substantial development in research and infrastructure, and will allow the description of local scale processes and phenomena within the climate change context. Especially in view of these future directions, climate downscaling will increasingly constitute a fundamental interface between the climate modeling and end-user communities in support of climate service activities.