Regional Climate Modeling: Advances, Constraints and Use for Adaptation Planning
A special issue of Climate (ISSN 2225-1154).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 October 2015) | Viewed by 86381
Special Issue Editors
Interests: africa; climate change and climate risk assessment; climate information dissemination and use; drought; hydroclimatic variability; hydrologic response to climate change; water resources.
Interests: climate variability; regional climate modeling; statistical prediction; african rainfall variability
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Increasingly, Regional Climate Models (RCMs) are being used for regional scale impact assessments and decision making to support climate change adaptation. It is easy to understand the basis for this interest. Compared to Global Climate Models (GCMs), RCMs presently have vastly superior spatial and temporal resolution. Moreover, being dynamic, RCMs simulate climate variables of interest throughout the spatial domain even for those areas where historical data may be lacking. The modeling community is optimistic that RCMs can only get better with time, significantly improving projections of future climate. Not surprisingly, the stakeholder community, used loosely to refer to practitioners interested in using RCMs for mitigation and adaptation planning, continue to express strong demand for RCMs. Spurring such demand is a sense of urgency in their need for regional scale climate projection tools that can be applied to the myriad of water resources, agricultural, ecosystem and other sectors impacted by climate change.
Despite obvious advantages, RCMs do have a number of limitations, including the fact that they generate biases on top of biases inherited from the mother GCMs. Indeed, several international meetings have been convened to explore the recent advances, potentials as well as limitations of regional climate models. Of particular interest to scientists and modelers are the questions of whether RCMs are good enough for use in adaptation and mitigation planning. We can add to these questions: how would we know when RCMs become good enough? What are the major obstacles and what is needed to overcome these obstacles? What should practitioners who chose to apply these models be mindful of to ensure results remain practically meaningful? This issue of Climate Research welcomes your contributions around these and related topics.
Dr. Aondover Tarhule
Dr. Zewdu T. Segele
Guest Editors
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Keywords
- adaptation and mitigation planning
- bias correction
- climate projections
- downscaling: dynamical and statistical
- general circulation models
- regional climate models
- impact assessment
- model reliability assessment
- model uncertainty
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