New Joint WCRP Coordination Office for Regional Activities: WCRP CORA
The World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) is very excited to announce the opening of the new WCRP Coordination Office for Regional Activities (CORA), jointly hosted by the Climate Service Center Germany (GERICS) in Hamburg, Germany, and the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research (BCCR) in Bergen, Norway.
CORA results from the recognition that climate variability and change impact regions of the world in complex and non-uniform ways and that the capacity of regions to conduct the science required to understand these complexities varies. The office will identify opportunities, resources and partners to promote regional climate science in order to address key challenges and objectives in the context of the WCRP Strategic Plan 2019-2029. In addition, the office will assist in integrating and synergizing regional activities within WCRP in cooperation with all WCRP bodies, particularly with the Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX). “This new joint office will empower integration and synergetic coordination for the regionally-focused activities that are spread broadly within the various activities,” said Prof. Pavel Kabat, Chief Scientist of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and Director of the WCRP Joint Planning Staff.
Left: Tore Furevik, Director of BCCR (Photo: Gudrun Sylte, Bjerknes Centre) and right, Daniela Jacob, Director of GERICS (Photo: Christian Schmid/HZG).
Prof. Tore Furevik, Director of BCCR, is excited about the possibilities that greater coordination of regional climate science activities brings. "We are thrilled to co-host WCRP CORA together with our friends in Hamburg and look forward to promoting regional climate science to address the key challenges and objectives identified by WCRP. As a centre with global modelling and prediction capabilities and research activities spanning from the Arctic to Antarctica and from the Atlantic to the Pacific, we should be well positioned to both contribute to - and benefit from - closer collaboration with WCRP."
Commenting on the establishment of the joint office, Professor Daniela Jacob, Director of GERICS, stated, “Reliable and robust regional climate information is a prerequisite for helping society adapt to climate change and variability. As a climate services organisation with long-standing expertise in regional climate modelling, active in various regions around the world, GERICS is only too well aware that some regions of the world are better catered for in this regard than others. Working in partnership with the Bjerknes Centre, with their wide-ranging expertise at the global level, means that, as a partnership, we offer a complementarity that I find difficult to imagine being better. As such, the joint office promises to strongly contribute to the aims and objectives of WCRP and we are really excited about what the future holds for regional activities, both from a science point of view and also in terms of helping to make sure that science is applied to solving real-world problems.”
The Coordination Office was officially launched on 1 September 2018, for a three-year implementation phase 2019-2021. The two host centers will present their work plan at the 40th Session of the WCRP Joint Scientific Committee (JSC) in April 2019.
To get in contact with the WCRP Coordination Office for Regional Activities (CORA), please contact Ragnhild Stolt-Nielsen, Head of Administration at BCCR, or Paul Bowyer, Senior Staff Scientist at GERICS
