High-resolution climate change projections over Australia: producing policy-relevant information
Alejandro Di Luca1, Jason Peter Evans
2, Daniel Argüeso
3, Roman Olson
1 and Lluis Fita Borell
4, (1)University of New South Wales, Climate Change Research Centre, Sydney, NSW, Australia, (2)University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia, (3)University of New South Wales, ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science, Sydney, Australia, (4)Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique, IPSL, Université Pierre et Marie curie, Paris, France
Contact First Author: Alejandro Di Luca; di_luca.alejandro@uqam.ca
Previously Published Material: Evans, J. P., F. Ji, C. Lee, P. Smith, D. Argeso, and L. Fita (2014), Design of a regionalclimate modelling projection ensemble experiment NARCliM, Geosci. Model Dev., 7 (2),621–629, doi:10.5194/gmd-7-621-2014.
English Abstract:
NARCliM (NSW/ACT Regional Climate Modelling project) is a regional climate modelling project aimed at providing a comprehensive climate dataset for the CORDEX-Australasia region at 50 km, and for southeast Australia at a resolution of 10 km. NARCliM projections will be used by NSW and ACT governments to design their climate change adaptation plans.NARCliM consists on an ensemble of Regional Climate Model (RCM) simulations performed to generate consistent climate information over the Australia for the periods: 1990-2009, 2020-2039 and 2060-2079. Three physical configurations of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) RCM with different parameterization schemes were chosen according to their performance and independence over the region of interest. They were driven by four CMIP3 Global Climate Models, which were also selected based on both performance and independence criteria. In addition to this 12-member ensemble created to simulate present and projected future climate, three 60-year simulations driven by NCEP/NCAR reanalysis were also completed to evaluate WRF in the region at time scales ranging from sub-daily to decadal.NARCliM was designed following a bottom-up approach in which the impact and adaptation communities were directly involved in project design. The simulations were designed to sample the uncertainty in both GCMs and RCMs, as well as to meet most of the requirements of risk assessments in a wide range of climate change impacts studies. Also, the raw output from the RCM simulations was post-processed to generate a range of products that better suit the needs of the various communities involved. These post-processed products include bias-corrected model outputs, climatic extremes using very high-resolution temporal (e.g., 5 minutes) data and formatting data in a broad range of temporal resolutions (i.e., hourly, daily and monthly). In this talk, we will present an overview of the design of the NARCliM project and we will describe in some detail the process of selection of the RCMs/GCMs together with the generation of the various post-processed products.
