Regional Climate Modelling

The Danish Climate Centre (DKC) has an extensive international scientific record within regional climate modelling and we are the leading national authority on regional climate change projections.

Regional climate models (RCM’s) are nested within global climate models (GCM’s) and provide a dynamically consistent way to ‘downscale’ the coarse GCM results to local detail for a limited area of interest. A typical regional climate model operates at a horizontal resolution of 25-50 km and may cover an area the size of Europe. Model development enables us to use an ever finer resolution in our RCM projections.

Since RCM’s are better able to resolve small scale features like surface topography and land use, regional climate projections are often coupled to local or regional impact models, e.g. addressing the impacts of climate change on groundwater, ecosystems or wind power production.

Focus areas

Regional Climate Modelling

Global Climate Modelling

Ozone, UVR and Climate

Radio Occultations

Ice Sheet Modelling

Processes in the Arctic

Developing Countries

Climate Data Host

The HIRHAM model

The DKC has co-developed the regional atmospheric climate model HIRHAM, which has been used for major national and international applications. Our regional modelling projects include research into climatic sensitivity to external forcing, natural climate variability as well as development and validation of state-of-the-art regional climate models. The flexible model setup makes it possible to use HIRHAM in a variety of applications and in regions around the world.


Precipitation in mm (left) and mean sea level pressure (MSLP) in hPa (right) simulations for Europe

The operational model, HIRHAM5, is coupled to a regional ocean model, and other developments include coupling of the model to an ice sheet model and a hydrological modelling system.

The Centre for Regional Change in the Earth System

The DKC coordinates the Centre for Regional Change in the Earth System (CRES), which brings together leading climate scientists and key Danish stakeholders and practitioners, with a need for improved climate information, e.g. in terms of implementing informed and robust climate change adaptation strategies in Denmark. CRES is funded by the Danish Council for Strategic Research.

CRES directs a coordinated research effort towards societal preparedness to climate change and enhances Denmark’s contribution to international climate change research. CRES also aims to reach out beyond its core group and create new national and international synergies between current and planned research activities in climate research and adjacent fields.

New scientists are trained to cope with uncertainties in regional climate change and its impact by invoking model tools of i) ocean - atmosphere coupling; ii) atmosphere - hydrology coupling; iii) ice sheets coupled in earth system models; iv) coupling between terrestrial and aquatic biosphere, v) their mutual interaction; vi) remote change such as the Greenland and/or Antarctic ice sheets; and vii) integration of climate change information in a risk management framework.

Hosting regional climate data

We are participating in a number of international RCM projects and have a prominent role in Europe as data centre for regional climate projections.

We currently host data from several comprehensive regional climate modelling projects, which are accessible worldwide through the DKC archives.

This includes the PRUDENCE project, which was initiated and coordinated by DKC as well as its successor the ENSEMBLES project.

The DKC has also been appointed data centre for the CORDEX project, which integrates data from regional climate projections from regions all over the world.

Follow the Climate Data Host link in the above Focus areas box to read more about our regional climate model data archives.

International research and collaboration

The DKC has participated in a number of international RCM-based projects directed towards a variety of climate related research and development areas.

The WATCH project examined the global freshwater cycle. CECILIA was a project addressing climate change impacts on forestry, agriculture, hydrology and air quality in Central and Eastern Europe. In the CIRCE project we aimed to highlight the impacts and possible adaptation actions for climate change in the Mediterranean region, Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. AG2020 is an interdisciplinary effort to analyse and discuss the future development within the world’s agricultural markets, and PESETA a project which focuses on the projection of economic impacts of climate change in sectors of the European Union based on bottom-up analysis. The DKC is also involved in the project ClimateCost which is a major research project on the economics of climate change, supported by the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme.

We are also participating in modelling projects in regions outside of Europe. One of these was the CARBO-NORTH project, which aimed to quantify the carbon budget in Northern Russia through the use of very high resolution regional climate modelling. The DKC has a specific focus on regional climate modelling within in the Arctic, read more about this in the Ice Cap Modelling and Processes in the Arctic sections of our web page.

The DKC's activities directed towards developing countries are also manifold. We are collaborating with local capacities and have made regional climate projections to assist a number of African and Asian countries in their future planning and adaptation efforts.

Contacts

Head of the Climate Research Division, Jens Hesselbjerg Christensen, jhc@dmi.dk
Phone: (+45) 39157 498

Edited by Tue Tobias Kosack, ttk@dmi.dk © DMI, 12 May 2011