Regional earth system modeling: review and future directions

Abstract

The authors review recent advances in the development of coupled Regional Earth System Models (RESMs), a field that is still in its early stages. To date, coupled regional atmosphere-ocean-sea ice, atmosphere-aerosol and atmosphere-biosphere models have been developed, but they have been applied only to limited regional settings. Much more work is thus needed to assess their transferability to a wide range of settings. Future challenges in regional climate modeling are identified, including the development of fully coupled RESMs encompassing not only atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere, biosphere, chemosphere, but also the human component in a fully interactive way.

Keywords

• Regional climate model
• regional earth system model
• atmosphere-ocean coupling
• atmosphere-aerosol coupling