WATCH Global Modelling

Welcome to the WATCH global modelling webpages! On these pages you will hopefully find all the information needed to participate in WaterMIP (Water Model Intercomparison Project), and do the WATCH global long-term modelling (WB3: Impact climate change on global water cycle, WB4: Multi-Model Analysis of Extremes, WB6: Water Resources). If you have any questions about the modelling activities, or availability of forcing data and/or modelling results, you can find contact information under submenu "Contacts".

The most important submenus are:

Workplan, meetings: An overview of the workplan. In addition you will find information on important dates about  e.g. submission deadlines and meetings related to the global modelling efforts.  

Modelling Protocol: Information on the long-term (30+ years) WATCH and WaterMIP model simulations, including model setup, which variables to submit, file format and naming convention. 20th and 21st century.

 

Important news 

CNRM-CM3 climate data (August 9, 2010): You may have noticed that for each climate variable of CNRM-CM3 there are two versions of year 2000 files available on the website: One in the 20C3M folder and one in each of the scenario folders (SRESA2, SRESB1). According to the CNRM-CM3 simulation protocol the SRES A2 and B1 simulations start from year 1999 of the 20C3M simulation. Hence, year 2000 from 20c3m should be used when conjoining 20c3m and scenario runs. Despite this fact we have decided to use year 2000 of the 20C3M simulation which should then be followed by year 2001 of the scenario simulations. This has been done in order to be cosistent with the WaterMIP simulation protocol and the other GCMs where year 2000 is considered as belonging to the control run. The README file has been updated accordingly. 

Bias corrected data, Tmax/Tmin (August 9, 2010): For those of you using the daily maximum and minimum temperatures of the bias corrected model data I would like to point out a possible obstacle when feeding the data into hydrological or other impact models: Due to the interpolation routine there is a small number of cases where the corrected T_max<T_mean, where T_max is the daily maximum of the corrected data, and T_mean is the daily mean. In these cases, the value of T_max can become slightly less than T_mean. This is not noticeable in all practical cases, including those that we tested before releasing the bias correction algorithm or the data. However, if your hydrological model makes the assumption T_max>=T_mean>=T_min, then this could lead to confusion or crashes.

WATCH daily disaggregator (July 30, 2010): The WATCH daily disaggregator code has been released. This allows creation of realistic subdaily data from the daily averages of the forcing variables from the 1960-2100 GCM runs. The code is available from the IIASA ftp server from the WFD_code directory within the WATCH_Forcing_Data section.