Advancing Australia’s Earth System Model.
To better understand Australia’s changing climate we need a Climate and Earth Systems Model tailored to our conditions and requirements.
ACCESS (Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator) is a state-of-the-art climate and earth system model to simulate the entire Earth’s climate. It’s used to understand the behaviour of the climate and its interactions with various components of the Earth system, including the carbon cycle. ACCESS provides important and unique climate data to inform considerations of climate risk, mitigation pathways, adaptation policy and decision-making, for Australia.
This project focuses on developing the next generation ACCESS Earth System Model to enhance our understanding of climate processes globally with a focus on the Australian and Indo-Pacific regions. This is to support policy relevant science in line with the Paris Agreement, to underpin regional climate projections, and to contribute to international modelling initiatives such as the Coupled Model Intercomparion Project (CMIP).
One of the main uses of ACCESS is to provide input for downscaling to derive regional scale climate information for Australia’s states and territories. ACCESS can also be used to explore a range of future climate scenarios at the global scale. Within this project and the Climate Systems Hub it has been used to explore areas such as sea surface temperature projections for the Great Barrier Reef, climate variability, climate stabilisation, including impacts on the Southern Ocean. It can also be used along with other global models to explore the impacts of temperature overshoots on marine ecosystems, to assess the implications of net-zero CO2 emissions on regional climate and to estimate future regional carbon budgets.
Want to know more?
Please contact the project leader: Tilo Ziehn, CSIRO
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