EURO-CORDEX annual meeting 2025 at GERICS and online

15th General Assembly of EURO-CORDEX

EURO-CORDEX GA 2025 (Image: Knut Görl / GERICS)

The yearly General Assembly of the European - Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment (EURO-CORDEX) took place from 28th to 30th of January 2025. During three days about 100 international scientists gathered at GERICS in the Chilehaus in Hamburg and virtually in order to share scientific findings and to jointly discuss how to organize their voluntary engagement in the frame of the global WCRP CORDEX initiative.

Past research findings were shared and future research was planned, addressing a large range of scientific topics. One major focus was on downscaling the global CMIP6 simulations and on the evaluation of the new generation of RCMs that will be employed for this endeavour. As official release date of the full EURO-CORDEX CMIP6 ensemble, the EURO-CORDEX community envisages the end of 2025. In the meantime, individual simulations will be pre-released in order to support researchers and users of this dataset to prepare for the release of the full ensemble. To support the use of the EURO-CORDEX climate simulation ensemble, an update of the community’s EURO-CORDEX guidelines is planned, any ideas and suggestions for contributions are welcome.

In order to facilitate and accelerate future downscaling efforts, stronger collaborations of the EURO-CORDEX community and the global modelling community were discussed. Concrete steps are the collaboration in the rapid evaluation framework of CMIP and the definition of essential variables and indicators for GCM performance evaluation relevant for downscaling. Also a joint and fair comparison of GCM and RCM performance skills and better guidances on their respective strengths and weaknesses is envisaged.

Additional topics that were discussed at the EURO-CORDEX GA 2025 were machine learning model emulators and statistical methods, the use of regional climate ensemble simulations in climate service products and convection permitting simulations.

EURO-CORDEX is the European branch of the international CORDEX initiative, a program that operates under the auspices of the WCRP the World Climate Research Program (WCRP). The purpose of CORDEX is to organize an internationally coordinated framework to produce improved regional climate change projections for all land regions world-wide.