WCRP CORDEX project

Since its beginning in 2011, members of HPSC TerrSys from the Institute of Bio- and Geosciences (IBG-3, Klaus Goergen et al.) are actively participating in EURO-CORDEX, the European branch of the CORDEX project. Aside from the WRF RCM, the fully coupled TSMP is used increasingly for long, regional climate change simulations. The simulation results are part of coordinated ensembles and freely available, provided and exchanged globally according to principles of open access research data, e.g., within the CORDEX and impact community.
Our own analysis contribution, based on the CORDEX RCM ensembles of hindcast (ERA-Interim driven) and future scenarios, is on the (changing) state and processes of the (terrestrial) water cycle. In this context, joint contributions have been, e.g., on land-atmosphere coupling. Since 2016, HPSC TerrSys also participates in one of the CORDEX Flagship Pilot Studies (FPS), the joint EURO- and Med-CORDEX FPS on Convective phenomena at high resolution over Europe and the Mediterranean. Here, for the first time, a convection-permitting ensemble of RCMs is run for a total of several decades, allowing for an improved representation of precipitation processes, dynamical processes, more detailed representation of surface properties and land-atmosphere interactions and boundary layer processes, plus many more examples of an added value as opposed to simulations at coarser spatial resolution.

All CORDEX-related simulations are run on HPC systems of the Juelich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), posing substantial challanges in terms of numerical modelling due to the length of the simulation runtime, the data volumes produced and the necessary configuration management and synchronisation within the international collaboration, strongly aided by JSC. Our official registered CORDEX name is FZJ-IBG3.