CORDEX Southeast Asia: Providing Regional Climate Change Information for Enabling Adaptation

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter describes the activities, progress and relevance of the Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment—Southeast Asia (CORDEX-SEA) in providing regional climate change information for enabling adaptation in Southeast Asia. Southeast Asia is a region that has been affected by climate change, particularly by the weather and climate extremes, and will likely to be impacted more in the future decades as global temperature continues to increase. The number of climate-related disasters, particularly floods, has increased since the last few decades. For climate resilience, countries in the region need to mitigate and adapt, which both require regional future climate change information. However, for robust formulation of adaptation measures, future climate change information at local scales is required. CORDEX-SEA was established to provide multi-model and high-resolution climate projections and fulfil climate model data requirements in the region. CORDEX-SEA has generated a reasonably good model ensemble of regional climate downscaling from 11 global climate models (GCMs) using 7 regional climate models (RCMs) at a spatial resolution of 25 km. Based on these projections, depending on region and seasons, significant changes in mean and extreme precipitation are projected to occur in the future decades. The generated downscaled data can now be used for climate risk assessment in the Southeast Asia region. Furthermore, the establishment of the Southeast Asia Regional Climate Change Information System (SARCCIS), a data node of the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF), facilitated the data archiving and dissemination of CORDEX-SEA data to end users and scientists involved in the assessment of vulnerability, impacts and adaptation (VIA).