What is CORDEX?
The COordinated Regional climate Downscaling EXperiment (CORDEX) was implemented under the auspices of the World Climate Research Program (WCRP) in order to improve downscaling techniques and their use in understanding and assessing regional climate change and the provision of robust regional climate information for application in vulnerability, impacts, and adaptation (VIA) studies. The CORDEX vision is to advance and coordinate the science and application of regional climate downscaling through global partnerships.
CMIP5-CORDEX: The CORDEX activity began with the downscaling of global projections from the fifth phase of the Climate Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) (CORDEX experiment design for dynamical downscaling of CMIP5) from 2010-2022. CMIP5-CORDEX data is already accessible on NCI via this area CORDEX AustralAsia.
CMIP6-CORDEX: CORDEX is an endorsed MIP under CMIP6. This experiment design document presents a simulation framework for the dynamical downscaling of global climate projections from the sixth phase of CMIP (CMIP6). The general aim is to downscale a subset of climate scenarios from the CMIP6 ensemble of projections generated in ScenarioMIP, and to make these downscaled regional scenarios publicly available (for more details see Gutowski et al. 2016 and the CORDEX White paper). In addition to the continental-scale downscaling, addressed in this document, CORDEX includes many other components. For example, the Flagship Pilot Studies (FPS) and regional workshops for climate and VIA communities. CORDEX is a continuous activity that is not divided into phases (1st, 2nd, etc.) and not necessarily related to the CMIP cycles. The framework described in this document is simply referred to as CORDEX-CMIP6. The design of CORDEX for CMIP6 is described further in the White paper for Euro-CORDEX. Further details of the CMIP6 protocol and experiments are described in a special issue of Geoscientific Model Development with an overview of the design and scientific strategy provided in the lead article of that issue by Eyring et al. (2016). Further information can also be found on the Earth System Documentation (ES-DOC) page: https://es-doc.org/cmip6/
CORDEX-CMIP6 models generate and publish model data in various regions and to different levels of detail. Most notably Atmosphere CORE (mandatory), Tier 1 (strongly recommended) and Tier 2 (optional).
NCI is part of the Earth Systems Grid Federation (ESGF), which coordinates the data management and release of CMIP (and CORDEX) data - https://gmd.copernicus.org/articles/14/629/2021/. For guidelines including instructions on use and citations of data for CMIP6, see: https://pcmdi.llnl.gov/CMIP6/Guide/dataUsers.html. For further details on CMIP data citation best practices also see the CMIP Data Citation page.
Image Source: https://www.knmi.nl/kennis-en-datacentrum/project/cmip6 and adapted from Eyring et al., 2016.