MedCORDEX-Baltic Earth-COST Workshop on

Regional Climate System Modelling for the European Sea Regions

Universitat de les Illes Balears, Palma de Mallorca, Spain
14- 16 March 2018

Thank you for participating in this workshop!

About 50 scientists from the Med-Cordex and Baltic Earth communities gathered at the University of the Baleares in Palma de Mallorca to discusss current issues in regional climate system modelling, in particular the coupling of processes in the atmosphere and the sea. This was already the second joint meeting of the Baltic and Mediterranean climate modelling communities. In the future, the two communities plan to share experience and expertise through common activities, like a common discussion forum, workshops and joint research projects and papers.

Workshop-Presentations can be found here...

Round Table Minutes here...

Scope

The aim of this workshop is to share recent progress in the understanding of regional climate variability with special focus on coupled effects between sea, atmosphere, land and anthroposphere. In this workshop, we will focus on European seas and their catchment areas like the Mediterranean Sea, Black Sea, North Sea, Baltic Sea and Arctic Ocean - highly sensitive areas where global models fail to give reliable information about changing climate because key processes are not properly resolved.

Coupled atmosphere–sea ice–ocean models have been developed further in the recent past by using a hierarchy of sub-models for the Earth system. In these Earth system models, regional climate models are combined with sub-models for surface waves, land surface and vegetation, hydrology, land and marine biogeochemistry, the marine carbon cycle as well as marine biology and food webs. These model systems aim to investigate the impact of climate change on the entire terrestrial and marine environment.

Contributions related to any aspect of the description and modelling of regional climate are welcome. Some of the topics addressed in the workshop will be the description of present and future regional climates, the development and evaluation of regional climate system models and the assessment of extreme and high impact events.

Sessions

Session 1
Development and evaluation of regional climate system models and reanalyses
New regional reanalyses and coupled atmosphere - ice - ocean - land surface/vegetation - biogeochemical/carbon - food web models are presented and the results of hindcast simulations are compared to observations. The problem of initialization of regional climate system models and the application of ocean synthesis to this purpose are also considered. Further, model improvement, new data sets for model evaluation and bias correction methods are particularly welcome.

Session 2
Studies on the added value of air-sea coupling and/or high resolution
Contributions on land-atmosphere, ocean-atmosphere and land-ocean (rivers, wetting and drying) interactions are encouraged. In particular, discussions on benefits (or lack of them) from the use of improved regional climate system models are welcome.

Session 3
Regional process studies and extreme and high impact events
Studies of all kind of regional processes including extreme and high impact events are welcome. The focus of the session will be on the basic scientific understanding of those processes and on assessing impacts on key areas with different adaptation potential.

Session 4
Climate change impact studies and uncertainty assessments of projections using coupled model simulations
Dynamical downscaling of Earth System Models, multi-model ensemble studies and multi-stressor approaches are expected. Studies comparing different emission scenarios and scenarios of other drivers of the earth system like environmental stressors and studies analyzing the effects of mitigation measures are welcome.