The main goal of this CORDEX Flagship Pilot Studies (FPS) project is to understand the effect of urban areas on the regional climate, as well as the impact of regional climate change on cities, with the help of coordinated experiments with urbanized RCMs.

This clearly complies with the first CORDEX FPS criterion to address regional to local scales problems and effects with local impacts, which cannot be addressed by the GCMs and is not included in the standard CORDEX framework.

The proposed activities require the specific data, both for specific land-use parameterization and the observational data, which are available from the previous campaigns, to make the expected simulations and their validation complying with the second CORDEX FPS criterion. This FPS action can be supported by – and contributing to – Special IPCC Assessment Report planned for cities after AR6, WCRP Grand Challenges – Weather and Climate Extremes – on local scale, and SDG (Sustainable Development Goal) on sustainable cities (#11), climate action (#13) and health (#3), providing information for risk management in these aspects to urban stakeholders, which corresponds to the third CORDEX FPS criterion. As for the fourth criterion, urbanization is important for many groups participating in CORDEX activities and going across the CORDEX domains as big cities appear in each of them. Clearly, careful selection of targeted coordinated simulations have to be performed.