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Towards ACCESS-Based Regional Climate Projections for Australia Towards ACCESS-based regional climate projections for Australia Chun-Hsu Su1, Harvey Ye1, Andrew Dowdy1, Acacia Pepler2, Christian Stassen1, Andrew Brown1, Simon O. Tucker3, Peter J. Steinle1 1Bureau of Meteorology, Docklands, Australia 2Bureau of Meteorology, Sydney, Australia 3Met Office, Exeter, UK July 2021 Bureau Research Report – 057 TOWARDS ACCESS-BASED REGIONAL CLIMATE PROJECTIONS FOR AUSTRALIA AUSTRALIAN TROPICAL CYCLONE-INDUCED EXTREME COASTAL WINDS IN CLIMATE DATASETS Towards ACCESS-based regional climate projections for Australia Chun-Hsu Su1, Harvey Ye1, Andrew Dowdy1, Acacia Pepler2, Christian Stassen1, Andrew Brown1, Simon O. Tucker3, Peter J. Steinle1 1Bureau of Meteorology, Docklands, Australia 2Bureau of Meteorology, Sydney, Australia 3Met Office, Exeter, UK Bureau Research Report No. 057 July 2021 National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Authors: Chun-Hsu Su, Harvey Ye, Andrew Dowdy, Acacia Pepler, Christian Stassen, Andrew Brown, Simon Tucker, Peter Steinle Title: Towards ACCESS-based regional climate projections for Australia ISBN: 978-1-925738-33-9 ISSN: 2206-3366 Series: Bureau Research Report – BRR057 i TOWARDS ACCESS-BASED REGIONAL CLIMATE PROJECTIONS FOR AUSTRALIA Enquiries should be addressed to: Lead Author: Chun-Hsu Su Bureau of Meteorology GPO Box 1289, Melbourne Victoria 3001, Australia [email protected] Copyright and Disclaimer © 2021 Bureau of Meteorology. To the extent permitted by law, all rights are reserved and no part of this publication covered by copyright may be reproduced or copied in any form or by any means except with the written permission of the Bureau of Meteorology. The Bureau of Meteorology advise that the information contained in this publication comprises general statements based on scientific research. The reader is advised and needs to be aware that such information may be incomplete or unable to be used in any specific situation. No reliance or actions must therefore be made on that information without seeking prior expert professional, scientific and technical advice. To the extent permitted by law and the Bureau of Meteorology (including each of its employees and consultants) excludes all liability to any person for any consequences, including but not limited to all losses, damages, costs, expenses and any other compensation, arising directly or indirectly from using this publication (in part or in whole) and any information or material contained in it. ii AUSTRALIAN TROPICAL CYCLONE-INDUCED EXTREME COASTAL WINDS IN CLIMATE DATASETS Contents Abstract ...................................................................................................................... 1 1. Introduction ....................................................................................................... 2 2. Experimental design for BARPA-R .................................................................. 4 3. Model bias studies ............................................................................................ 6 3.1 Daily maximum temperature ..................................................................................... 7 3.2 Daily minimum temperature ...................................................................................... 9 3.3 Vapour pressure ..................................................................................................... 11 3.4 Precipitation ............................................................................................................ 12 4. Added value analysis for extreme weather ................................................... 15 4.1 Temperature ........................................................................................................... 16 4.2 Precipitation ............................................................................................................ 18 5. Severe thunderstorm potential and extreme wind gusts ............................. 18 6. Cyclone climatology ....................................................................................... 21 7. Discussion and outlook .................................................................................. 22 8. Appendix .......................................................................................................... 24 8.1 Model bias studies .................................................................................................. 24 8.2 Added value analysis for extreme weather ............................................................. 27 8.3 Severe thunderstorm diagnostic CS6 ..................................................................... 27 Acknowledgements .................................................................................................. 28 References ................................................................................................................ 28 iii AUSTRALIAN TROPICAL CYCLONE-INDUCED EXTREME COASTAL WINDS IN CLIMATE DATASETS ABSTRACT A new modelling framework for dynamical downscaling from global climate model (GCM) data has been developed for application in the Australian region, known as Bureau of Meteorology Atmospheric Regional Projections for Australia (BARPA). BARPA is intended for use in producing fine-scale projections of historical and future simulated climates. It uses the atmosphere and land model components from the Australian Community Climate and Earth- System Simulator (ACCESS) that are based on a global atmosphere configuration of UK Met Office Unified Model, complementary to other regional climate model (RCM) approaches currently available for Australia and surrounding regions. The use of the ACCESS model is also intended to provide some similarities to other modelling suites used in the Australian Bureau of Meteorology including for operational weather forecasting, seasonal prediction and historical reanalysis data sets, as part of broader goals towards providing services across a range of time scales that are as consistent (seamless) as possible. Here we describe the moderate horizontal resolution (~12 km) BARPA-R modelling framework and present results from its application to global reanalysis data from ERA-Interim. The BARPA-R output is assessed against observations-based data, including analysis of the added value it provides as compared to the host model. This work demonstrates that BARPA yields stable and realistic simulations of near-surface meteorological parameters and provides added regional information to the host global data. It is intended that BARPA-R will help contribute to a broader set of RCMs available for understanding future climate changes in the Australian region, including for enhanced planning and preparedness in relation to phenomena such as wildfires, cyclones and rainfall extremes. 1 TOWARDS ACCESS-BASED REGIONAL CLIMATE PROJECTIONS FOR AUSTRALIA 1. INTRODUCTION Australia is a place of large inter-annual variability and has experienced extreme weather events including precipitation (Ashcroft et al., 2019), drought (Van Dijk et al., 2013), heatwaves (Perkins-Kirkpatrick et al., 2016), cyclones (Chand et al., 2019; Dowdy et al., 2019a), thunderstorms (Allen et al., 2011) and bushfires (Dowdy, 2018). With extreme events projected to become more pronounced with climate change including in Australia (Meehl et al., 2000; Coumou et al., 2012; Seneviratne et al., 2012; CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology, 2015; Bell et al., 2019; Dowdy et al., 2019b), there is an increasing need for robust fine-scale projections of key climate variables. Spatially and temporal high-resolution climate model output is generally needed in climate change impact and adaptation studies particularly when conducted on regional and local scales. While modern global climate models (GCMs) are technically able to simulate the climate on fine spatial and temporal scales (Schär et al., 2020) this is often out of reach given the current computational constraints, such that regional climate modelling approaches can be beneficial. Nested limited-area regional climate models (RCMs) first started being developed about 30 years ago to overcome the limited computational resources by providing fine-resolution climate data only for a specific region rather than globally (e.g., Tapiador et al., (2020) for a review). RCMs are deployed over a region of interest and because of their smaller domain size can be run at an increased spatial and temporal resolution as compared to GCMs (Laprise et al., 2008; Tapiador et al., 2020). This allows them to account for local details such as complex topography, land-sea contrasts and regional surface characteristics that cannot be resolved or considered in GCMs. Consequently, RCMs have the potential to more accurately simulate processes relating to precipitation and extreme events in areas with complex landscape (Torma et al., 2015), and thus are increasingly important for regional impact and physical risk assessment (Giorgi et al., 2009; Di Virgilio et al., 2019). Further, beyond the moderate resolution of ≥ 10 km, regional models with kilometre or smaller length scales can explicitly simulate some convective cloud processes and replace parameterizations of moisture convection in coarser models. More accurate representation of local storm dynamics and physical processes (including microphysics and thermodynamics) are still needed in convective-permitting models to further improve the credibility of climate projections of convective extremes (Kendon et al., 2014). Postprocessing of model simulations to produce
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