Global climate models (GCMs) help us understand large-scale climate trends but lack the detail needed for local and regional impacts. To address this, we developed a new set of high-resolution climate simulations for North America using dynamical downscaling. These simulations are based on the latest CMIP6 models and have a 12 km grid spacing over the continent. They span historical and future periods under two emissions scenarios (SSP2-4.5 and SSP3-7.0) and form part of the next phase of the North American CORDEX project (NA-CORDEX).

We compare these new simulations to observed climate data, earlier NA-CORDEX simulations based on CMIP5 (with coarser resolution), and convection-permitting CONUS-404 simulations (4 km). Our goal is to understand how resolution affects projections of key climate features, including extreme weather events. While NA-CORDEX simulations do not resolve individual convective storms, we evaluate how well they represent broader regional climate patterns and whether they offer improvements over global models. This work highlights the trade-offs between computational cost and the level of detail needed to better understand future climate conditions.