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The regional climate projections in the Climate Data Store (CDS) are a quality-controlled subset of the wider (CORDEX) data dataset over Europe. The CORDEX vision is to advance and coordinate the science and application of regional climate downscaling through global partnerships. It aims to evaluate regional climate model performance through a set of experiments aiming at producing regional climate projections. The goals of CORDEX are:
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ANDRAS: I thought the non-European domains will use the same set of variables, is that a wrong assumption? Jose, would you check this, please?
JOSE: The non-European domains include the set of 15 variables (plus land-sea mask and orography), when available (not all models provide all variables).
The CDS subset of CORDEX data have been through a metadata quality control procedure which ensures a high standard of reliability of the data. It may be for example that similar data can be found in the main CORDEX archive at the ESGF (Earth System Grid Federation) however these data come with no quality assurance and may have metadata errors or omissions. The quality-control process means that the CDS subset of CORDEX data is further reduced to exclude data that have metadata errors or inconsistencies. It is important to note that passing of the quality control should not be confused with validity: for example, it will be possible for a file to have fully compliant metadata but contain gross errors in the data that have not been noted. In other words, it means that the quality control is purely technical and does not contain any scientific evaluation (for instance consistency check).
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We can mention the additional effort (of 34d) to find the additional data for non-European domains. Maybe the link to the IPCC Atlas should be also mentioned. GL: I agree. Jose, would you provide some additional text about the IPCC Atlas, a link, possibly?
Additional JOSE: I included that information below, after describing the efforts (and funding) was devoted to support CORDEX activities. Unfortunately there is no link yet since the information regarding the report is confidential (to prevent leaking) until it is releases (in July 2021).
Additional efforts (and funding) were devoted to support CORDEX activities by 1) providing support to archive in the ESGF relevant simulations available from the modeling centers for non-European domains not published in the ESGF earlier, and 2) making new simulations for the EURO-CORDEX domains. These activities which are contributing to a significant enhancement of the regional climate model matrix over different domains make new simulations for the EURO-CORDEX domains, which significantly enhances the EURO-CORDEX regional climate model matrix in terms of emission scenarios, global model forcing and regional climate models. For the non-European domains resources were put into finding simulations, which were not available before (and not published in the ESGF earlier).
The effort done by COPERNICUS to consolidate a World-wide CORDEX dataset is also contributing to the IPCC-AR6 activities, providing a curated dataset to be assessed together with global climate information from CMIP experiments, in particular in the Interactive Atlas, a new product of the IPCC allowing exploration of observed and projected climate data to complement the assessment of relevant datasets undertaken in the WG I chapters.
In addition, CORDEX data for CDS includes Persistent IDentifiers (PID) in their metadata which allows CDS users to report any error during the scientific analysis. The error will be at least documented on the ESGF Errata Service (http://errata.es-doc.org), but also planned to be documented in the CDS. The CDS aims to publish only the latest versions of the datasets.
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We are aiming at publishing various CORDEX domains for the entire World. The CDS-CORDEX subset at the moment consists of the Europe (EURO), Mediterranean (MED), North America (NAM) and Arctic (ARC) CORDEX domains More details are available for the EURO-CORDEX activities at https://www. euro-cordex.net/. More details of the entire list of CORDEX domains can be found at https://cordex.org/domains/; additionally more details for the EURO-CORDEX activities are available at https://www.euro-cordex.net/
Please note that the domains are not on regular grids. Projections may differ depending on the domain and the Regional Climate Model (RCM). The coordinates below are the maximum and minimum values of the domain window. As a summary, the available domains are:
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Regional Climate Model (RCM) simulations needs lateral boundary conditions from Global Climate Models (GCMs). At the moment the CDS-CORDEX subset boundary conditions are extracted from CMIP5 global projections. In general the CORDEX framework requires each RCM downscale a minimum of 3 GCMs for 2 scenarios (at least RCP8.5 and RCP2.6). ANDRAS: please check this, if this is still valid for the non-European domains. Jose, would you check this, please?
JOSE: I think that was not mandatory in the experimental proposal so we are not constraining the simulations on that (we include all simulations which provide historial + some scenario).
The C3S-EURO-CORDEX subset aims to fill the gaps in this matrix between GCMs (aka "driving models), RCMs and RCPs. This will ensure better representation of uncertainties coming from GCMs, RCMs and RCP scenarios and make possible to study the regional climate change signals in a more comprehensive fashion.
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