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 facilitate end-user decisions and actions and to support climate change impact assessments is an integral part of this chain. Only the derivation of user relevant quantities that can be integrated into the decision process of the users make such forecasts relevant.

A series of recent projects such as CMIP5, CORDEX, Med- & EURO-CORDEX, SPECS, EUPORIAS, 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.
• The combination of decadal predictions and projections for longer time scales to provide users information in a seamless and statistically reliable manner.
• 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