Perspectives for regional earth system modeling

The recent development of regional climate models which can potentially produce long-term (multi-year to multi-decadal) simulations at high spatial resolution (5–50 km), opens a range of possibilities for interactive coupling with ecosystem, hydrology, ocean-sea-ice and chemistry models on the regional scale. Such coupling offers two primary advantages: (1) It is accomplished at scales more consistent with regional processes and available models; (2) It allows the explicit description of fine scale interactions between different Earth System components. A discussion of available models, strategies for coupling and issues which would especially benefit from an integrated regional modeling approach is presented.