Med-CORDEX (Mediterranean)
Med-CORDEX is an open club of Mediterranean climate model developers and users, driven by scientific curiosity. It is self-organized, and based on voluntary efforts and is endorsed by CORDEX, Med-CLIVAR, and HyMeX.
Its scientific focus is on the regionally closed energy and water cycles, which implies developing and applying coupled ocean-atmosphere-land high-resolution climate models.
Over the past 15 years, our overarching scientific goals have been to:
• | understand the past variability of the Mediterranean regional climate system and characterize its potential future evolution; | • | investigate, understand, and improve the description of regional climate phenomena and | • | contribute to the characterization of the impacts of Mediterranean climate change |
Med-CORDEX began in 2009 as an official CORDEX domain, following the European CIRCE project and funded by the HyMeX program. It develops reference modeling frameworks to provide coordinated regional climate simulations, focusing on the various components of the Mediterranean climate system, including the atmosphere, land, ocean, and aerosols.
Multi-channel coordination is achieved through a mailing list (medcordex@meteo.fr), a website (www.medcordex.eu), a Slack-based discussion forum (medcordex.slack.com), a Zenodo community (https://zenodo.org/communities/medcordex/), and an active steering committee (medcordex-sc@meteo.fr).
Med-CORDEX has published numerous scientific works, including two reference publications (Ruti et al. 2016, Somot et al. 2018b) and 145 scientific articles between 2011 and 2024, including a special issue in Climate Dynamics in 2018 and various multi-model studies.
The Med-CORDEX centralized database hosted by ENEA includes 125 datasets (12 TB uploaded, 42 TB downloaded), contributed by 15 institutes and used by 305 registered users. This database supports extensive research and collaboration within the Mediterranean climate community. Three of the first endorsed CORDEX Flagship Pilot Studies (FPSs) were proposed by Med-CORDEX, focusing on key regional climate processes and their interactions:
Role of the natural and anthropogenic aerosols in the Mediterranean region: past climate variability and future climate sensibility
Role of the air-sea coupling and small-scale ocean processes on regional climate
Convective phenomena at high resolution over Europe and the Mediterranean
Over the years, Med-CORDEX's contributions to Mediterranean climate and ocean science have been recognized by international initiatives such as Med-CLIVAR, C3S, IPCC-AR6, and MedECC-MAR1. Notably, it was the only coordinated initiative providing ocean variables from regional climate models to the IPCC-AR6 interactive atlas.
In 2023 Med-CORDEX published an updated version of the Med-CORDEX-CMIP6 baseline run protocol: Med-CORDEX phase 3: Common protocol for the Baseline runs for the CORDEX-CMIP6 framework.
The current Points of Contact in this domain are:
MED-CORDEX: Erika Coppola, Bodo Ahrens, Gabriel Jordà, Gianmaria Sannino, Samuel Somot and Fabien Solmon
MED-CORDEX domain
More information on activities within our domains can be found at the CORDEX website under Domain activities
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