Climate models are invaluable research tools for understanding past, current and future climate. They produce the underpinning data and analysis required to generate policy-relevant information on future global and regional climate.
Australia is investing in the development of our national weather and climate model, the Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator (ACCESS), to explore the response of different social and economic futures, and what they mean for Australia’s variable and changing climate.
We’re engaging with the broader ACCESS community, including federal, state and territory governments and researchers from across our partner organisations, to co-design future research directions and policy-relevant applications for ACCESS. Our focus will be on collaborating with the new ACCESS National Research Infrastructure (ACCESS-NRI) to help the NRI achieve its aim of transforming the quality, scale and relevance of Australia’s research into weather, water and climate.
We’re also applying ACCESS to generate better information for input into regional and global climate projections, and to inform the (emissions) pathway Australia chooses to follow. This includes generating large ensemble climate model results for the Australian Climate Services, University of Queensland and ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes, exploring the likelihood and impact of exceeding global temperature targets, and analysing land-based carbon mitigation.
This project will identify and co-design ACCESS research priorities, deliver Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) ACCESS configurations to ACCESS-NRI, and run large model ensembles to investigate potential responses of the climate system to different emissions pathways and changes in the carbon-climate cycle.
For more information:
Want to know more? Please contact the project leads:
Tilo Ziehn, CSIRO and Hongyan Zhu, Bureau of Meteorology