​
19 Participants from 7 countries; namely Indonesia, Mongolia, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Vietnam and Japan gathered at AIT, Pathumthani, Thailand on 19-20 February 2018 to learn about a Downscaler for climate change impact assessments, adaptation planning and urban planning.The training workshop was organized by RRC.AP in collaboration with the Ministry of the Environment, Japan, University of Tsukuba, and the Center for Environmental Science in Saitama, Japan. Spatially-detailed climate prediction is essential for assessing impacts of climate change and designing corresponding adaptation strategies and measures to address the impacts. Climate projection can also allow for assessing effects of urban planning and land-use alternation on local thermal environment. Currently, climate impact assessment researchers and land use and urban planners would need to either request climate modeling specialists to generate necessary data or apply dynamic downscaling to the data by themselves in order to obtain detailed spatial climate prediction data in accordance to their respective purposes.

However, dynamic downscaling requires advanced specialized knowledge; hence its application is extremely difficult. Responding to the needs for making local climate change projections and assessments without advanced modeling skills, Dr. Hiroyuki Kusaka (University of Tsukuba), Dr. Masayuki Hara (Center for Environmental Science in Saitama) and Yasutaka Wakatsuki (Ibaraki University) have developed a downscaling assessment system called S8·SI-CAT Downscaler. It aims to keep the workload to a minimum for those non-specialists of climate modeling, including government officers and researchers responsible for local climate change projections. The workshop provided the participants with hands-on exercises on the specific functions of S8·SI-CAT downscaler required for particular purposes for utilization.