EURO-CORDEX annual meeting 2017, at the Climate Service Center Germany (GERICS), Hamburg, Germany

The seventh EURO-CORDEX Annual General Meeting was held at GERICS from January 31 to February 2, 2017. More than 50 scientists from all over Europe attended. At the beginning of the conference, participants discussed the incorporation of EURO-CORDEX in the broader scientific context and global initiatives such as WCRP and CORDEX.

On the second day, the co-ordinator of CORDEX-Africa, Bruce Hewitson, from South Africa was involved in order to explore possible cooperation between the two CORDEX initiatives. This was followed by reports and discussions from the EURO-CORDEX columns established last year (Dynamic Downscaling, Climate Information Distillation, Empirical Statistical Downscaling) and the two CORDEX Flagship Pilot Studies, both under EURO-CORDEX Management ("LUCAS - Land Use & Climate Across Scales "and" Convective phenomena at high resolution on Europe and the Mediterranean "in co-direction with the Med-CORDEX Initiative).

In scientific presentations, the regional climate modelers also presented the progress made in the past year and solutions for current issues. The focus here was on advances in regional climate modeling in order to be able to map regional to local processes even better. This includes the development up to convection-permitting regional climate simulations. Thus, in the future - especially for some impact and adaptation studies, as well as for air conditioning service products - important small-scale information can be delivered. In addition, together with representatives of the German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ), technical aspects of data archiving as well as the further procedure in this area were discussed. An important need to interface with the users of the data is to capture problems with model simulations and make them transparent. A planned initiative was welcomed by all participants, because supporting the correct use of the EURO-CORDEX Ensemble is a big concern of the involved actors.