EURO-CORDEX Data Guidelines

Guidance for EURO-CORDEX climate projections data use.

The Guidance for EURO-CORDEX climate projections data use is intended to provide background information, best practices and links to further information for users of regional climate model data. The main target audiences are researchers in impacts communities, engineers in industry and the public sector, or small and medium enterprises. For each topic, a short summary of the most important aspects is given, followed by references for further and more detailed information. It is important to note that this document represents the current state-of-the-art from the EURO-CORDEX community. However, it is a living document and will be updated as our understanding of regional climate and regional climate change as well as regional climate modelling improves.

In order to provide feedback, please send an email to feedback@euro-cordex.net.

Contents:

• 1. General information on the climate system
  • 1.1. General Remarks
  • 1.2. What is climate?
  • 1.3. What is climate change?
  • 1.4. What is climate variability?
  • 1.5. What is the difference between climate variability and climate change?
  • 1.6. What are climate scenarios?
  • 1.7. What are climate models (global and regional)?
  • 1.8. What is the added value of regional climate models?
  • 1.9. What are limits of climate modelling?
  • 1.10. How can climate model simulations be evaluated?
  • 1.11. Why are ensemble climate projections needed?
  • 1.12. How should an ensemble of climate projections be used?
  • 1.13. How to identify a “robust expected change” among the mass of information?
• 2. Interpreting regional climate projections
  • 2.1. General remarks
  • 2.2. How to interpret small-scale structures?
  • 2.3. How to interpret time and space variability?
  • 2.4. How to interpret and adjust model biases?
  • 2.5. How can climate change results be communicated?
• 3. Model data formats and structures
  • 3.1. What kind of data do models generally produce?
  • 3.2. How to download EURO-CORDEX projections?
  • 3.3. How to change netcdf into other formats?
  • 3.4. How to read EURO-CORDEX data into analysis tools?
  • 3.5. How to extract a specific region?
  • 3.6. Examples of EURO-CORDEX data use
  • 3.7. How to cite the EURO-CORDEX ensemble in publications?
• 4. Appendix
• 5. Sidebar Examples
  • 5.1. Headings
  • 5.2. Let’s Rock Some Lorem!
• 6. RST Syntax Examples
  • 6.1. Citations
  • 6.2. Headings
  • 6.3. Code
  • 6.4. Admonitions
  • 6.5. Footnotes
  • 6.6. Icons
  • 6.7. Tables
  • 6.8. Code Documentation
• 7. Bibliography

Indices and tables

• Index

• Search Page