These trainings were jointly developed and delivered by ICIMOD and the Met Office, UK’s national meteorological agency, the WCRP/CORDEX Offfice at Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute, the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) – Pune, and several local organizers.
The training activities aimed to build underpinning knowledge and skills for analysing regional climate change projections produced by the Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX). This covered an introduction to; understanding climate change science, modelling and downscaling, accessing and using the CORDEX datasets, and applying tools for analysing and visualizing climate change projections at different time scales.
Bangladesh workshop
In March 2022, a training on "Spatial and temporal climate change analysis using CORDEX regional climate models over Bangladesh" was performed. The training helped the participants to better understand climate model projections. They used a set of regional climate simulations, and selected representative models which best replicate historical climate signals. They also assessed spatial and temporal variability of present and future climate change over a defined area of interest.
Earlier workshops in this series
- In October 2020, a training was organized on Regional climate change projections: Climate change analysis using CORDEX regional climate models over South Asia for professionals from national meteorological and hydrological services in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Pakistan.
- In June 2021, a country-focused training for the Department of Hydrology and Meteorology and Tribhuvan University was held in Nepal.
- In December 2021, the training focused on using CORDEX regional climate models for spatial and temporal analysis of climate change over South Asia for professionals from Bangladesh.
Building knowledge and skills
The trainings focus on analysis of climate change in time and space using CORDEX regional climate models across South Asia. The participants learn to calculate biases and to select a few representative models within a particular area of interest.
The purpose is to build knowledge and skills of the participating professionals through understanding results from CORDEX regional climate models. The participants thus had the opportunity to delve into how different tools can be used to analyze and visualize climate simulations on different space and time scales. This provides a basis for being able to build up a domestic expertise.
Understanding climate model simulations
By studying several different regional climate models the participants in Bangladesh practised selecting the ones that best show historical climate signals for a specific area. They also could practice assessing variations in climate change for that area.
They thus gained an overall understanding for climate modeling and downscaling, and are now expected to be able to:
- manage CORDEX datasets in different areas and compare them with reference data
- visualize variations in time and space in climate simulations
- interpret uncertainties in model results
- produce Climate information that meets local and regional needs
The overall idea is to build knowledge, capacity and competence among staff at key institutions that work with climate. By doing this, we can help making climate information better meet the needs for well-founded decisions locally and regionally.