Regional climate change is influenced greatly by regional features such as topography , which are not well represented in global models because of their coarse resolution. Models of higher resolution cannot practically be used for global simulation of long periods of time. To overcome this, regional climate models, with a higher resolution ( 20 km) are constructed for limited areas and run for shorter periods (20 years or so). RCMs take their input at their boundaries and for sea-surface conditions from the global AOGCMs. RCMs are applied for many applications such as:

1-Regional climate changes.
2-Impacts on water resources.
3-Impact on agriculture and desertification.
4-Impact on land-use changes.
5-Impacts on air quality.
6-Chemistry-Climate interaction.
7-Radiation-aerosols interaction.
8-Cloud-aerosols interaction.
9-Climatic feedback of desert dust aerosols on African monsoon and East Asia.

Our ICTP-RegCM was developed in order to help generate high-resolution climate change information for as many regions of the world as possible. The intention is to make ICTP-RegCM freely available to groups of developing countries in order that they may develop climate change scenarios at national centres of excellence, simultaneously building capacity and drawing on regional climatological expertise. These scenarios can be used in impact, vulnerability and adaptation studies, and to aid in the preparation of National Communications.

For much more detailed information about ICTP-RegCM please view the ICTP-RegCM web site http://users.ictp.it/RegCNET/ .