Ocean-CORDEX: Advancing Regional Ocean Climate Projections through International Coordination
Xuebin Zhang
(Xuebin Zhang, Marcus Thatcher, Yi Jin and Richard Matear)
Ocean-CORDEX (Task Force on Regional Ocean Climate Projections – Cordex) is a new international task force endorsed by WCRP CLIVAR–OMDP (Ocean Model Development Panel) and RIfS–CORDEX (Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment). It aims to address a critical gap in climate change information. While global CMIP models provide essential large-scale insights, their coarse resolution limits applicability for many regional and coastal stakeholders. Ocean-CORDEX seeks to bridge this gap by coordinating high-resolution regional ocean downscaling efforts worldwide.
Leveraging CORDEX’s successes, lessons learned, and community experience, Ocean-CORDEX is working to establish unified protocols for model design, evaluation, and data sharing. The task force is strategically positioned to deliver broad impact through partnerships with CMIP7, FishMIP, and the upcoming IPCC AR7 assessment, ensuring relevance to both science and policy.
As part of this global effort, the CSIRO team, supported by the Australian Climate Service (ACS), is contributing a regional focus through the development of AUSROD (Australian Regional Ocean Downscaling). This initiative uses two regional ocean models (ROMS and MITgcm), driven by both raw and CORDEX-downscaled CMIP6 forcings, to improve projections of ocean state and variability around Australia.
We welcome community engagement and collaboration to strengthen Ocean-CORDEX as a global platform for coordinated, high-resolution ocean climate information.
Please use this thread for discussion about this talk.