The “Climatic hazard Assessment to enhance Resilience against climate Extremes for Southeast Asian megacities (CARE for SEA megacities)” project is the latest activity under the Southeast Asia Regional Climate Downscaling / Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment Southeast Asia (SEACLID / CORDEX-SEA) collaboration. Started in October 2023, this three-year project is funded by the Asia-Pacific Network for Global Change Research (APN). CARE for SEA megacities aims to generate city-scale climate hazard information for SEA megacities (Bangkok, Hanoi, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur and Manila) under multiple SSP scenarios that will be relevant and useful for policy-making to enhance urban resilience in a globally warmer future.
Following the inception workshop and stakeholder consultation in Bangkok, Thailand last November 2023, a three-day training workshop on empirical statistical downscaling (ESD) and urban climate downscaling was held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on 14-16 May 2024. With support from APN and WCRP CORDEX, the workshop was hosted by Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (Malaysia), with Manila Observatory (Philippines) as co-organizer.
The workshop aimed:
- To introduce city-scale urban modeling approaches, including empirical statistical downscaling (ESD), Land Surface Physics-Based Downscaling (LSP-DS), and Weather Research and Forecast-Urban (WRF-Urban);
- To build capacity of CARE for SEA megacities research team in applying different downscaling methods, in preparation for generating city-scale climate change projections for SEA megacities; and
- To discuss city-scale resolution downscaling framework for SEA, including protocol for ESD simulations, specifically for CORDEX-SEA.
This in-person training workshop has both lecture and hands-on sessions on ESD, Land Surface Physics-Based Downscaling (LSP-DS) and urban modeling, which will be used in generating cityscale climate hazard information for the CARE for SEA megacities project. The training workshop was primarily for members of the CARE for SEA megacities project team, who will be conducting the urban downscaling simulations.
