About CORDEX

• CORDEX is a World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) framework to evaluate regional climate model performance through a set of experiments aiming at producing regional climate projections.

• A Global Climate Model (GCM) can provide reliable prediction information on scales of around 1000 by 1000km covering what could be a vastly differing landscape (from very mountainous to flat coastal plains for example) with greatly varying potential for floods, droughts or other extreme events. Regional Climate Models (RCM) and Empirical Statistical Downscaling (ESD), applied over a limited area and driven by GCMs can provide information on much smaller scales supporting more detailed impact and adaptation assessment and planning, which is vital in many vulnerable regions of the world.

• A Global Climate Models (GCM) can provide us with projections of how the climate of the earth may change in the future. These results are the main motivation for the international community to take decisions on climate change mitigation. However, the impacts of a changing climate, and the adaptation strategies required to deal with them, will occur on more regional and national scales.
  This is where Regional Climate Downscaling (RCD) has an important role to play by providing projections with much greater detail and more accurate representation of localised extreme events.

• CORDEX-East Asia is the East-Asian branch of the CORDEX initiative and will produce ensemble climate simulations based on multiple dynamical and statistical downscaling models forced by multiple global climate models.

• CORDEX-Phase I experiments for East Asia region have been completed successfully, and their outputs are welcomed to be used by analysis groups as well as IAV sectors via http://cordex-ea.climate.go.kr

• Phase-II experiments with smaller domain but with higher-resolution are prepared by EA groups. Multi-GCM/RCMs metrics are essential, and RCM should be further developed toward RCESM to capture more realistic activities of monsoon front and tropical cyclones.