The World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) has an international initiative called the COordinated Regional climate Downscaling EXperiment (CORDEX). The goal of the initiative is to provide regionally downscaled climate projections for most land regions of the globe, as a compliment to the global climate model projections performed within the Coupled Model Intercomparison Projects (CMIP). CORDEX includes data from both dynamical and statistical downscaling. It is anticipated that the CORDEX dataset will provide a link to the impacts and adaptation community through its better resolution and regional focus. Participation in CORDEX is open and any researchers performing climate downscaling are encourage to engage with the initiative. Here I present the status, early results, and future plans for the CORDEX-AustralAsia region.

The model evaluation framework consists of RCM simulations performed using the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) ERA-Interim re-analysis (Uppala et al., 2008) as “perfect boundary conditions”. These simulations have been evaluated against regional datasets over Australia and some results are presented here. The climate projection framework within CORDEX is based on downscaling of GCM simulations from CMIP5. CORDEX will focus on the GCM experiments using emission scenarios known as RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 which represent a mid and a high-level emission scenario. These GCM driven simulations will be analysed in the near future.

The next phase, CORDEX2, will downscale CMIP6 simulations in a similar fashion to CORDEX but with the addition of the CORDEX-CORE simulations which provide a common set of simulations across all CORDEX domains. CORDEX is an open collaborative initiative and encourages participants who may wish to contribute downscaled climate projections or use the downscaled projections in their impacts/adaptation work.