Spatial and temporal climate change analysis using CORDEX regional climate models over South Asia

Organizers: ICIMOD and Met Office

Agenda List Of Participants

Background

In October 2020, ICIMOD and the Met Office, UK’s national meteorological agency, partnered with the World Climate Research Programme, the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute, and the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) – Pune, to organize a training on Regional climate change projections: Climate change analysis using CORDEX regional climate models over South Asia. Organized under the UK Aid supported Asia Regional Resilience to a Changing Climate (ARRCC) programme, the training is part of ARRCC’s institutional capacity-building approach to strengthen the knowledge and capabilities of staff working at key national and regional institutions, delivering climate services to provide information needs for informed climate change responses in South Asia.

As a follow-on activity to the 2020 training, country focused trainings are being organized for professionals from different national meteorological and hydrological services (NMHS) in ARRCC focal countries– Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Pakistan – under ICIMOD’s Climate Services Initiative. The 2021 edition will focus on using CORDEX regional climate models to carry out spatial and temporal analysis of climate change over South Asia.

This training will introduce climate change science, and will focus on bias calculation and selection of few representative models for a defined area of interest. The training will delve deeper into how R based tools can be used to analyse and visualize climate change projections spatially at different time scales.

Objectives

The training aims to build underpinning knowledge and skills for analysing climate change projections using CORDEX regional climate model simulations.

Expected outcomes

This training will help participants better understand climate model projections using 17 regional climate models, selecting the representative models which replicate the historical climate cycles, and assessing spatial and temporal variability of present and future climate change over a defined area of interest.

In addition to gaining an overall understanding of climate modelling and downscaling, the participants will be able to:

• Prepare CORDEX datasets in areas of interest and compare these with reference datasets
• Visualize spatial and temporal variation in climate change projections
• Interpret uncertainty in model results

Participation

In its current iteration, this training is being offered to professionals from the Department of Hydrology and Meteorology (DHM), and relevant institutions in Nepal.

Due to the current COVID19 pandemic, the training will be organized virtually.

Tentative agenda

Timings are in Nepal Standard Time (NPT, UTC+05:45).