Regional climate downscaling for Southeast Asia and the Philippines: Progress and opportunities

Abstract

Southeast Asia, including the Philippines, is considered most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change due to the exposure of its high population and vulnerable systems to multiple hazards, coupled with low coping and adaptive capacities of its developing countries. In the past decade since Southeast Asia Regional Climate Downscaling / Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment - Southeast Asia (SEACLID/CORDEX-SEA) was established, significant progress has been made in providing robust climate change information for the region. Projections from multiple models and scenarios are especially useful in investigating the range of potential climate impacts, including extreme events, that are increasingly likely to happen with global warming. Although results have shown that local climate is more reasonably captured by downscaling global climate model output, biases in the mean temperature and rainfall are still noted in the simulations. The mechanisms behind these model biases are further investigated, in addition to methodologies that are being applied to prepare climate datasets for local adaptation and impact studies.