The Vulnerability, Impacts, Adaptation and Climate Services Advisory Board (VIACS AB v1.0) contribution to CMIP6

Abstract

Abstract. This paper describes the motivation for the creation of the Vulnerability, Impacts, Adaptation and Climate Services (VIACS) Advisory Board for the Sixth Phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6), its initial activities, and its plans to serve as a bridge between climate change applications experts and climate modelers. The climate change application community comprises researchers and other specialists who use climate information (alongside socioeconomic and other environmental information) to analyze vulnerability, impacts, and adaptation of natural systems and society in relation to past, ongoing, and projected future climate change. Much of this activity is directed toward the co-development of information needed by decisionmakers for managing projected risks. CMIP6 provides a unique opportunity to facilitate a two-way dialog between climate modelers and VIACS experts who are looking to apply CMIP6 results for a wide array of research and climate services objectives. The VIACS Advisory Board convenes leaders of major impact sectors, international programs, and climate services to solicit community feedback that increases the applications relevance of the CMIP6-Endorsed Model Intercomparison Projects (MIPs). As an illustration of its potential, the VIACS community provided CMIP6 leadership with a list of prioritized climate model variables and MIP experiments of the greatest interest to the climate model applications community, indicating the applicability and societal relevance of climate model simulation outputs. The VI-ACS Advisory Board also recommended an impacts versionPublished by Copernicus Publications on behalf of the European Geosciences Union.

WCRP COordinated Regional Downscaling EXperiment (CORDEX): a diagnostic MIP for CMIP6

“…It is thus important that a communication channel is active across these different programs. Also, the VIA community places great expectations on CORDEX2, so that it is critical for CORDEX to interact with the CMIP6 Vulnerability, Impacts, Adaptation and Climate Services (VIACS) Advisory Board (Ruane et al, 2016) to clearly identify and communicate the value, limitations and uncertainties of the information that can be provided through the CORDEX downscaling experiments. A process-oriented analysis of models and techniques, based on high-quality observational datasets, will thus be a central activity of the CORDEX2 program.…”

The state of the art and fundamental aspects of regional climate modeling in South America

“…is related to the communication channel among different programs. There is no doubt of the importance of CORDEX to interact with the CMIP6 Vulnerability, Impacts, Adaptation and Climate Services (VIACS) Advisory Board in order to identify and communicate the value, limitations, and uncertainties of the information provided through the CORDEX downscaling experiments.…”

Selection of a representative subset of global climate models that captures the profile of regional changes for integrated climate impacts assessment

“…In the process of selecting GCMs for a global study it would also be useful to examine the annual quadrant classifications in important regions of interest, as presented in Additional file 1: Figure S2. Further validation exercises that explore the extent and ramifications of regional temperature and precipitation biases within the GCMs would also be quite useful for a wide number of climate applications (Ruane et al 2016).…”