A recently launched project under the auspices of the World Climate Research Program's (WCRP) Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiments Flagship Pilot Studies program (CORDEX-FPS) is presented. This initiative aims to build first-ofits-kind ensemble climate experiments of convection permitting models to investigate present and future convective processes and related extremes over Europe and the Mediterranean. In this manuscript the rationale, scientific aims and approaches are presented along with some preliminary results from the testing phase of the project. Three test cases were selected in order to obtain a first look at the ensemble performance. The test cases covered a summertime extreme precipitation event over Austria, a fall Foehn event over the Swiss Alps and an intensively documented fall event along the Mediterranean coast. The test cases were run in both "weather-like" (WL, initialized just before the event in question) and "climate" (CM, initialized 1 month before the event) modes. Ensembles of 18-21 members, representing six different modeling systems with different physics and modelling chain options, was generated for the test cases (27 modeling teams have committed to perform the longer climate simulations). Results indicate that, when run in WL mode, the ensemble captures all three events quite well with ensemble correlation skill scores of 0.67, 0.82 and 0.91. They suggest that the more the event is driven by large-scale conditions, the closer the agreement between the ensemble members. Even in climate mode the large-scale driven events over the Swiss Alps and the Mediterranean coasts are still captured (ensemble correlation skill scores of 0.90 and 0.62, respectively), but the inter-model spread increases as expected. In the case over Mediterranean the effects of local-scale interactions between flow and orography and land-ocean contrasts are readily apparent. However, there is a much larger, though not surprising, increase in the spread for the Austrian event, which was weakly forced by the large-scale flow. Though the ensemble correlation skill score is still quite high (0.80). The preliminary results illustrate both the promise and the challenges that convection permitting modeling faces and make a strong argument for an ensemble-based approach to investigating high impact convective processes. Keywords Convection-permitting • Ensemble models • Climate applicationsThis paper is a contribution to the special issue on Advances in Convection-Permitting Climate Modeling, consisting of papers that focus on the evaluation, climate change assessment, and feedback processes in kilometer-scale simulations and observations. The special issue is coordinated by

Radiation spectra of supercritical black hole accretion flows are computed using a Monte Carlo method by postprocessing the results of axisymmetric radiation hydrodynamic simulations. We take into account thermal/bulk Comptonization, free-free absorption, and photon trapping. We found that a shock-heated region (∼10 8 K) appears at the funnel wall near the black hole where the supersonic inflow is reflected by the centrifugal barrier of the potential. Both thermal and bulk Comptonization significantly harden photon spectra although most of the photons upscattered above 40 keV are swallowed by the black hole due to the photon trapping. When the accretion rate onto the black hole isṀ2 , where L E is the Eddington luminosity, the spectrum has a power-law component which extends up to ∼10 keV by upscattering of photons in the shock-heated region. In higher mass accretion rates, the spectra roll over around 5 keV due to downscattering of the photons by cool electrons in the dense outflow surrounding the jet. Our results are consistent with the spectral features of ultraluminous X-ray sources, which typically show either a hard power-law component extending up to 10 keV or a rollover around 5 keV. We found that the spectrum of NGC 1313 X-2 is quite similar to the spectrum numerically obtained for high accretion rate2 ) source observed with low viewing angle (i = 10Our numerical results also demonstrate that the face-on luminosity of supercritically accreting stellar mass black holes (10 M ) can significantly exceed 10 40 erg s −1 .

We calculate the chemical evolution of protoplanetary disks considering radial viscous accretion, vertical turbulent mixing and vertical disk winds. We study the effects on the disk chemical structure when different models for the formation of molecular hydrogen on dust grains are adopted. Our gasphase chemistry is extracted from the UMIST Database for Astrochemistry (Rate06) to which we have added detailed gas-grain interactions. We use our chemical model results to generate synthetic near-and mid-infrared LTE line emission spectra and compare these with recent Spitzer observations.Our results show that if H 2 formation on warm grains is taken into consideration, the H 2 O and OH abundances in the disk surface increase significantly. We find the radial accretion flow strongly influences the molecular abundances, with those in the cold midplane layers particularly affected. On the other hand, we show that diffusive turbulent mixing affects the disk chemistry in the warm molecular layers, influencing the line emission from the disk and subsequently improving agreement with observations. We find that NH 3 , CH 3 OH, C 2 H 2 and sulphur-containing species are greatly enhanced by the inclusion of turbulent mixing. We demonstrate that disk winds potentially affect the disk chemistry and the resulting molecular line emission in a similar manner to that found when mixing is included.