An Overview of Climate Projections Performed for North America CORDEX

The North American CORDEX (Coordianted Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment) program (NA-CORDEX) has produced a good number of projections of climate according to the first phase of the CORDEX program.   These simulations are based on a wide range of regional and global climate models, and some matrices of combinations have resulted.  The RCMs involved include:  WRF, CanRCM4, CRCM5, RegCM4, RCA4, and HirHam5.  Driving GCMs include:  EC-EARTH, CanESM2, HadGEM2-ES, GFDL-ESM2M, and MPI-ESM-LR.  These GCMs nicely span the equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) of the GCMs making up the CMIP5 suite of models (2.4 to 4.6 degrees C).  Simulations have been performed both at .44 and .22 spatial resolutions and in some cases for both the RCP8.5 and 4.5 scenarios. From these simulations, several matrices result.  In this talk we will focus on the 3 x 2 x 2 matrix resulting from simulations  with both RegCM4 and WRF driven by three differeent AOGCMs at the two different spatial resolutions for the RCP 8.5 scenario.  AOGCMs providing boundary condtions include HAdGEM2-ES,  GFDL-ESM2M and the MPI-ESM-LR.  An additional matrix is formed by  HirHam5 and RCA4 being driven by EC-EARTH, for both RCP8.5 and 4.5 at .44 resolution, thus forming a 2 x 2 matrix.  Finally, CanRCM4, CRCM5, and RCA4 have been driven by CanESM2 for both RCP 8.5 and 4.5 at .44 spatial resolution, resulting in a 3 X 2 matrix.  We will present overview results for the quality of the current climate simulations, focusing mainly (but not exclusively) on results for WRF and RegCM4 and their driving GCMs  regarding climate change in the mid-21^st century and late 21^st century for both temperature and precipitation.  Contrasts in spatial correlations of the changes will also be presented, and particular emphasis given to the differential added value at 50 versus 25 km resoltuions.