Convenors:
Shoshiro Minobe (Hokkaido University, Japan)
Enrique N. Curchitser (Institute of Marine and Coastal Science,
          Rutgers University, USA)

Plenary Speaker:
Arne Biastoch (GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research, Germany)

Invited Speaker:
Shin-ichi Ito (FRA, Japan)

Predicting climate change impacts on regional ocean processes and marine ecosystems is challenging because it (1) involves advanced and high-resolution models for the ocean and its resources, (2) has concrete consequences in terms of regional and national management of ecosystem services, and (3) aims to provide direct scientific support in the implementation of the Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries Management.  A number of practical and conceptual challenges occurring at the regional scale will be highlighted in this session.
               
First, regional projections are subject to uncertainties that arise from the baseline global climate projections, the downstream modelling tools and in combining models. Regional models (RM), including regional air-sea coupled models or regional ocean models, are the starting points for understanding and projecting climate change on a regional scale. While global climate models are capable of capturing the large-scale mean climate behavior, they have limitations for regional assessments due to their coarse spatial resolutions. We welcome papers addressing the downscaling of global climate models to regional scale, including a variety of methods, both statistical and dynamical, such as high-resolution regional ocean circulation models with embedded biogeochemical models, and statistical models relating local population statistics to climate forcing or climate indices.

Secondly, expanding the RM projections to predicting climate change impacts on regional ecosystems in combination with other drivers such as fishing, requires the integration of ecosystem processes and knowledge on the ecosystem functioning, though a combination of multiple models. The use of multiple models can be three fold: (1) using several multidisciplinary models to build end-to-end models from the physics to the high trophic levels and their exploitation; (2) using multiple models to address uncertainty of the projections due to model structure and processes (e.g., envelope approach, or comparative approach across models); and (3) using multiple hybrid approaches to integrate most of available information and data such as combination of climate statistical niche models and foodweb models. We welcome papers addressing the challenges and uncertainties in combining multiple models for regional global change impacts on ecosystems, and provide the opportunity for papers that combine different modelling approaches in order to improve the projections of global change, including climate change in combination with other stressors such as fishing and pollution.