This session focuses on exchanging ideas and progress in regional earth system modeling, data synthesis, and policy-relevant application efforts. Over the past decade or so, regional earth system modeling is a fast emerging and rapidly growing research endeavor. The entire research and stake-holder communities are facing great challenges and opportunities. Challenges exist in understanding physical, chemical, biological, and human processes across multiple spatiotemporal scales and in processing big data from remote sensing, in-situ observations, decision-making, ensemble simulations, and comprehensive modeling output. Currently, we are lacking an adequate understanding of the coupling mechanisms and our projections of future climate/environmental changes for local and regional-scale planning are still at an exploratory stage. As a grand challenge in global change studies, therefore, it is a top priority to develop high-resolution regional earth system models that are capable of producing policy-relevant outputs for regional climate change adaption and mitigation decisions.

• A - Atmospheric Sciences
• H - Hydrology
• OS - Ocean Sciences
• SY - Science and Society