Climate modeling collaboration between Arctur and ICTP

20. 11. 2012 / Tourism The ICTP purchased about 1 million CPU hours on the Arctur supercomputing system to conduct a series of regional climate change simulations with the ICTP regional climate modeling system RegCM4.

These simulations were part of an international program called Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment, or CORDEX, which will provide a new generation of high resolution climate change information for use in impact and vulnerability assessment studies.  An ensemble of climate projections for the 21st century were conducted for 5 regions of the World: the Mediterranean, Africa, Central America, South America and South Asia, two greenhouse gas emission scenarios, a low end and a high end one, and different model configurations. This represents a unique and unprecedented set of projections in terms of number and variety of runs with a single regional modeling system which will allow us to provide important climate change information for the regions above, to characterize the main sources of uncertainties in regional climate projections and to provide tremendous insights into the behavior of regional climate models.

The runs were carried out over a period of about 3 months with ~1000 dedicated CPU processors, and produced some 150 terabytes of data. Students from the different regions involved in the project were invited to ICTP to contribute to its completion, thereby providing an important component of capacity and local know how building. 

 

The results of these model simulations are currently being analyzed and a first set of scientific papers is being produced for a special issue of Climatic Change, one of the top rated scientific journals in climate change science.  The results will also be presented, among others, at a large conference which will take place in Brussels on November 4-8, 2013 in collaboration with the European Commission.