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The World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) in 2008 created the Task Force on Regional Climate Downscaling (TFRCD), chaired by Filippo Giorgi and Colin Jones. CORDEX was then initiated in 2009 at a meeting in Toulouse.
Before the start of CORDEX there were some skeptical attitudes. William Gutowski, former member of the Science Advisory Team (SAT) and later SAT co-chair, describes what it was like during a meeting:
“I was at a meeting on one WCRP working group, presenting plans for a regional climate modeling assessment program, when one member of the working group stated that regional climate modeling is mathematically ill-posed (and therefore invalid). I could not remember at the time what that meant, but I later dug around to find that a mathematically well-posed problem has a unique solution to the conditions supplied and the solution varies continuously with smooth changes in those conditions. That would then mean that climate simulation with global models is ill-posed, because for many values of the solar constant (the primary boundary condition), Earth has two stable solutions: our contemporary climate and an Ice-covered Earth. Moreover, as the solar constant varies, Earth’s climate can potentially jump discontinuously from one of those climates to the other. This anecdote is an example of the high skepticism we encountered early on, despite all the validation work that had already been occurring with RCMs.”
In response to this earlier skepticism we can today underline the fact that the CORDEX user community is large and continuously growing.
The first International Conference on the Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment – CORDEX – was held in Trieste, Italy 21-26 March, 2011. It was devoted to a review of the status and main issues of the CORDEX initiative over the various CORDEX domains. Special sessions were devoted to the Africa domain and to the assessment of the first multi-model CORDEX simulations over this region.
Following the pioneering and successful work of the Task Force on Regional Climate Downscaling (TFRCD) which mandate ended in 2011, the WCRP established a CORDEX Science Advisory Team in 2012. In 2013 CORDEX had 13 domains and was still growing!
There was a call for an International Project Office during 2014 and at the end of the year the office opened at SMHI, in Norrkoping, Sweden. The first Director was Eleanor O’Rourke and these are her memories of CORDEX:
“I became involved in CORDEX in around 2013 helping to support some of the communication activities and events, including the ICRC- CORDEX2013 in Brussels. In 2014 discussions intensified on the need for an International Project Office for CORDEX (IPOC) given the expanding and diverse activities. Given SMHI’s strong contribution and interest in CORDEX, a bid was made to host the new IPOC and was successful. I was delighted to be selected as the founding Director and the IPOC kicked off in January 2015 with the second CORDEX-SAT meeting taking place in Norrkoping in February 2015 (photo below of everyone trying not to look too cold!).
I immensely enjoyed working with everyone in the CORDEX community as it is so diverse, enthusiastic and knowledgeable with a very clear connection to the real world impacts. I was privileged to travel to CORDEX domain meetings in Bogota, Johannesburg, and Manila – experiences, and people, I will never forget.
In terms of achievements, it is all down to the amazing CORDEX community, but seeing some of the results of funding I secured to support CORDEX Africa presented at the WCRP OSC in Kigali during my time as IPOC Director really felt great!
Happy 15th Birthday CORDEX, here’s to many more!”
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