The prediction of changes in the climate mean state, variability and extremes (high-impact weather and climatic events) remains a key challenge for decadal to centennial timescales. Recent advances in both climate modelling and dynamical and statistical downscaling methods provide the base to develop refined national, regional and global predictions and scenarios using ensemble and probabilistic techniques. The tailoring of such climate scenarios to cover end-user needs and climate change impacts assessments is another related challenge.

A series of recent projects such as CMIP5, CORDEX, EURO-CORDEX, SPECS, MiKlip, COST-VALUE and others have been established to tackle these aspects. The session invites papers related to these projects and covers the topics:

• Developments associated with national, regional and global climate predictions and climate scenarios.
• Developments in dynamical and statistical downscaling techniques on local to global scales, evaluation of the added value of downscaling, process-based model evaluations, methods to quantify scenario uncertainties.
• Achievements and examples in tailoring climate prediction and scenarios for impacts assessments, use of prediction and scenarios for various societal sectors, examples of national climate scenarios.