Climate Change Downscaler Training Workshop

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Spatial climate prediction is essential for assessing impacts of climate change and designing and prioritizing adaptation strategies and measures to address the impacts. Climate change projection can also facilitate land use and urban planning through the assessment of impacts of land use change on regional climate change.  Currently, climate impact assessment researchers and land use and urban planners need to either request climate prediction researchers 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 own 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, the University of Tsukuba has developed a downscaling assessment system called S8 Downscaler. It aims to keep the workload to a minimum for those non-specialists of climate modeling, including climate change impact assessors, land use planners and urban planning analysts, to acquire information regarding local climate change projections. It also enables assessing impacts of future urbanization and farmland development on regional climate change and mitigating effects of greening and energy-saving policies on regional heat environments.

This workshop aims to enhance the understanding on the easy running of S8 downscaler among non-climate modeling specialists, particularly a) climate change impact assessment researchers or government officers at national or provincial level, b) land use and urban planning officers and c) research institutes engaging in the designing of national or local adaptation strategies. The workshop will provide the participants with hands-on exercises on 1) basic functions of S8 downscaler, 2) specific functions of S8 downscaler required for particular purposes for utilization.

Although S8 downscaler is equipped with several spatial resolution options including 30km, 20km, 10km, 4km and 2km, this training workshop will mainly focus on downscaling exercises with the spatial resolution of 30km and 20km. The downscaling operation with the spatial resolution of 10km, 4km and 2km outside of Japan requires connecting to cloud services or a super computer run by the University of Tsukuba, and it is still at the stage of configuration of the connection.