INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON
CLIMATE DOWNSCALING STUDIES
Tsukuba – Japan, October 2017

Session 4: Interdisciplinary Studies on Regional
Climate Studies
ReportHideki Kanamaru
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
Localized Climate Data and Risk Information in Support of Transformational
Climate Change Adaptation in the Agriculture Sector
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FAO concentrates mainly on SDG 2. Climate change effects: resilient agricultural
practices, increase productivity, and adaptation to extreme weathers.
Related to DS scientists, SDG 13 (Climate Action) mentions the Green Climate Fund andhow it should be directed to develop meaningful mitigation actions and theirimplementation.
FAO supports projects shifting equally between adaptation and mitigation, aiming to a50:50 balance over time. The investment engages directly with private and public sector.
And, the adaptation allocation of fund is mainly directed to the most vulnerable countries.
Some Examples: water-related, agriculture, irrigation, infrastructure.
There is a need for a more localized information about vulnerability and risks supported byrobust evidence.
Transformational climate adaptation should be long-term oriented, beyond development,
beyond one-time investment and have an innovative approach
The studies should be aware of the national and regional policies, and advice how theauthorities should allocate the resources.
Scale matters, country-ownership, promote evidence

Discussions: Opportunities for local institutions to collaborate, how and with whom?

Prof. Douglas Maraun, University of Graz
Challenges in Downscaling Research••••

It has been criticized how there is a lack of science in the adaptation plans. Therefore, it
should be evaluated how useful actually can be downscaling.
Issues:• Bias are errors that come from different sources, which have a different impact byclimate signal.
• Sometimes, bias does not make sense, anything can be bias corrected because that isfor what it is being calibrated.
• Extremes show more bias at lower scales even if the correction at lower scales wassuccessful.
• Simulations with different parameterization schemes show different results.
• The correction is meaningless if the models cannot solve well the small scale issues.
Validation Tree:• Identify the user’s problem and define which climatic phenomena is relevant to thatproblem.
• Which aspects are triggering this phenomena, whether it is a problem of marginal
distributions, temporal, spatial or even intervariable. And finally decide which indices
are more appropriate to evaluate the performance of the model
The models or methods should try to resolve the small scale issues and be able to reproduce
the analyzed phenomena. Less is more -> More robust not always the best practice

Key Words: process-informed downscaling, focus selection on individual applications, processbased model selection
Discussions: Weather Generators (to much information less physics), applications in sparse
regions

Prof. Ke-Sheng Cheng
National Taiwan University
Estimating Design Rainfalls Using Dynamical Downscaling Data••••••

Hydrological modeling requires design rainfalls that mostly depend on pastobservations and a statistical analysis of past extreme events.
How to use climate models to do this kind of analysis.
Design rainfalls depend on rainfall types and have different characteristics liketime to peak and peak rainfall percentage.
The data is very limited to perform a proper analysis of extreme events, therefore,
instead of considering annual maximums, they propose using event maximums.
Moreover, they propose a mixture of mixture of distributions in order to be able tohave design rainfalls for each type of rainfall types.
The results showed good agreement with observed data, even capturing thedominance of typhoons in the analyzed areas.

Key words: hydrological modeling at local scales, adaptation to available climate data

Discussions: Ensembles of models can improve this analysis? May be notProf. Masaru Inatsu
Hokkaido University
Toward Substantial Social Implementation of Climate ChangeAdaptation Technology. An Advanced Attempt in Hokkaido••••••••

This talk was aimed to give an extensive answer to a questions made by Mr.
Takayabu 2 years ago.
In 2016, 6 typhoons approached the Hokkaido island causing extreme
precipitations.
RECCA, which is a Research Program on Climate Change Adaptation: develop
software to refer hydrological and weather information for climate adaptation
projects. The output is available to local governments, private sector, Covering
agriculture, water resources, energy, tourism and transportation.
Their studies consider the results of various possible futures combining GCMs andRegional Atmospheric Models (concerned about climate sensitivity, and consider
different emission scenarios)
Some of the results show an increase of precipitation due to water vapor increase,and very likely temperature will increase by 3 to 4 K by the end of this century.
Some interesting examples were given about the impacts of the estimated climatechange like potatoes not dying, likely decrease of sugar production, qualityreduction of snow, wine production conditions will be favorable, and thegeneration of line-shaped rainfalls causing a change in the risk-vulnerable areas.
2016: special committee for water hazard was created2017: climate change adaptation was implemented in Hokkaido

Key words: data distribution, local impact-assessment, creation of local policies