CORDEX - Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment
The CORDEX project is project-managed by the Climate Systems Analysis Group at UCT. There is an increasing need for detailed, high-resolution regional information regarding future climate. Information at this regional scale is needed by scientists in disciplines that require climate information (e.g. hydrologists), as well as decision- and policy-makers, and by those assessing climate change impacts, adaptation and vulnerability. Although climate change projections must necessarily be undertaken with global models, such models do not have sufficient spatial detail for all applications. Constraints on available computing resources will always limit model resolution; therefore, various techniques have been developed for ‘downscaling’ global climate projections (and shorter-term climate predictions) and for producing fine-scale regional climate information. These include nested regional climate models, variable resolution global models, global uniform high-resolution time-slice simulations, statistical downscaling, and/or combinations of these methods.