New Joint WCRP Coordination Office for Regional Activities: WCRP CORA

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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.

CORA Office

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 This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., Head of Administration at BCCR, or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., Senior Staff Scientist at GERICS.

About the two centers:

Bjerknes logo
GERICS logo
The Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research (BCCR) is a collaboration of the University of Bergen, NORCE, the Institute of Marine Research and the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center of Norway. The Centre gathers more than 220 scientists working on past, present and future aspects of climate, combining fieldwork and theory with numerical modeling. The Centre actively contributes to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reporting, providing data to the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP), research results and contributing authorships. BCCR coordinates the development and implementation of the Norwegian Earth System Model (NorESM) and the Norwegian Climate Prediction Model (NorCPM) and conducts regional downscaling for Norway, Europe (EURO-CORDEX), and for selected regions in South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. It is a leading international centre for predicting Arctic-Atlantic climate change in a global context, with the mission to understand climate for the benefit of society.
The Climate Service Center Germany (GERICS) was initiated by the German Federal Government in 2009 as a fundamental part of the German high-tech strategy for climate protection. Since June 2014, GERICS has been a scientific organizational entity of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht Zentrum für Material und Küstenforschung GmbH and operates as a think tank for climate services, developing prototype climate service products that directly respond to user needs. GERICS works in close cooperation with science and practice partners and provides advisory services and decision-relevant information in order to support government, administration, and business in their efforts to adapt to climate change. The current focus of GERICS' work is organized around three key economic sectors, water, energy, and ecosystems. A second major strand of their work is helping cities plan and adapt to a changing climate.