Twenty-first-century challenges in regional climate modeling

The Third International Lund Regional-scale Climate Modeling Workshop was held between 16-19 June, 2014. Regional climate models (RCM) typically consist of atmospheric and land surface components. Coupled regional atmosphere?ocean?sea ice models overcome the inner-domain dependency of RCMs from the driving GCM by simulating a physically consistent sea surface temperature (SST). It is clear that regional climate is influenced by the large-scale circulation and thus the overall global climate. RCMs with new components and higher resolution bring about new model evaluation issues and inform the value-added aspect of downscaling. RCMs? added value in time-mean quantities and maps is well established in regions of strong local, finescale forcing in the presence of contrasting orographic features, coastal areas, etc . Coordinated experimentation with RCMs has advanced. The major development has been the international Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX).