Dynamical downscaling of EC-Earth3-Veg over the EURO-CORDEX domain with WRF: A contribution to CORDEX-CORE Phase II

The broader Euro-Mediterranean region, encompassing most of Europe as well as parts of North Africa and the Middle East, has been identified by the IPCC as one of the fastest-warming regions globally. At the same time, it has experienced a marked increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, including heatwaves and droughts. Reliable regional climate information is therefore essential for understanding ongoing changes and supporting climate impact assessments. Within the framework of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP), CORDEX provides coordinated regional climate model (RCM) simulations to advance regional climate downscaling and its applications. Over the past two decades, it has generated standardized datasets to support analyses of present and future climate extremes, trends, and impacts on society, ecosystems, and agriculture across fourteen continental-scale domains, covering nearly all global land areas. Following the CMIP5-driven CORDEX simulations used in the latest IPCC Assessment Report, the newly launched CMIP6-driven CORDEX initiative is expected to further populate community data repositories and contribute to the next IPCC assessment. In the present study, we evaluate historical simulations over the EURO-CORDEX domain, obtained by dynamically downscaling the CMIP6 EC-Earth3-Veg Earth system model using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. The simulations follow the CORDEX-CORE Phase II experimental protocol and model configuration. Model performance is assessed against the E-OBS v30.0e daily gridded observational dataset. The evaluation focuses on key near-surface meteorological variables, including temperature and precipitation, examining spatial patterns, aspects of extreme weather, seasonal variability, and systematic biases.