Climate Change
Climate change research in ESP mostly focuses on the completion
and analysis of regional scale future climate projections under
increased concentrations of anthropogenic greenhouse gases (GHG)
and on the study of related uncertainties. The main tool used for
this research is the ICTP regional climate model RegCM4, which is
the fourth version of the RegCM regional modeling system released
in the summer of 2010. The RegCM is a portable, user friendly
community model developed and maintained by ESP staff. It is
currently used by a wide community of scientists in Africa, Asia,
Europe, North America and South America. This community forms the
ESP-coordinated Regional Climate Research Network, or RegCNET,
which currently includes over 700 participants. The RegCM is
currently employed for a wide variety of applications, including
paleo-climate, process studies, future climate projections,
climatic effects of aerosols, biosphere-atmosphere interactions,
climatic effects of land-use change, climate impacts on health,
agriculture, air quality and hydrology.
Climate change research in ESP also makes use of large ensembles
of global and regional climate simulations completed as part of
European and international projects such as CMIP3, CMIP5, ENSEMBLES
and CORDEX, in which ESP staff are actively involved. The
availability of large multi-model ensembles allows an assessment of
uncertainties in climate change projections which is critical for
the use of climate change information in impact studies. Within
this context, ESP develops and maintains a range of observational
and model-based datasets for use by the outside research
community.
ESP staff scientists are currently involved in a number of
European and international projects dealing with climate change and
related impacts, in particular CMIP3, CMIP5, CORDEX, ENSEMBLES,
CECILIA, ACQWA, MEGAPOLI, QWECI, SOCOCA, CLIMRUN, HEALTHY
FUTURES.
Activity coordinator: Filippo Giorgi
Contributors:
- Xunqiang Bi
- Erika Coppola
- Fabien Solmon
- Claudio Piani
- Nellie Elguindi
- Bamba Sylla
- Gulilat Tefera Diro
- Laura Mariotti
- Ashraf Zakey *
- Allison Steiner **
- Ahmed Shalaby ***
- Ahmed Tawfik **
* Now at the Danish Meteorological Institute
** University of Michigan
*** University of Cairo
