P.PSH.0951 - Northern Australia Climate Program

Summary

The Northern Australia Climate Program is a research, development, and extension program designed to improve the capacity of the red meat industry in managing drought and climate risk across northern Australia. Phase 2 of the program improved the accuracy of available climate models, produced new and improved climate forecasts at multiple timescales, produced new and locally relevant decision support tools, to help producers integrate climate prediction technologies into decision making. MLA are now working on Phase 3 of NACP, which involves developing a Profitable Grazing Systems (PGS) training package.

Objectives

The objective of NACP Phase 2 was to build the capacity in Australia to contribute to the development of, and to test and evaluate particularly in multi-week/seasonal prediction mode, new coupled model improvements of the joint UKMO/BOM GC* series of coupled models, and to contribute to initiatives such as the Indo-Pacific PEG. This was done with a focus on reducing model
errors and biases, and improving forecast accuracy over Northern Australia.

This was to ensure that UKMO/BOM GC* versions used in future upgrades of ACCESS-S show greater accuracy than would be the case otherwise, and therefore provide NACP stakeholders and customers with future ACCESS-S forecasts with superior multi-week and seasonal forecast accuracy.

Key findings

Both a climate (u-bs992) and an NWP (u-br658) configuration of GC4 have been ported to the NCI infrastructure and run successfully. Initial tests of the scientific validity of GC4 on Gadi indicate it is running correctly and producing results which are comparable to those obtained from the UKMO.

Versions of the NWP configuration have been upgraded to UM12.1 (u-cl383) and further upgraded to include CoMorph (u-cl384).

The process of porting GC4 to the NCI infrastructure has highlighted weak points in the support for coupled models there, which can now be addressed. Additionally, motivated by the outcomes of this porting work, a shared, portable reference suite is now being developed jointly by the BoM and the
UKMO. This will facilitate more rapid adoption of new model versions from the UKMO and enable increased contribution of Australia-focused improvements back into future model versions.

This availability of the latest frozen GC release from the UKMO on Gadi has enabled the development and testing of model improvements such as CoMorph over Australia, and contribution to activities such as the Indo Pacific PEG. This will in turn expedite the work of proving improvements are stable for inclusion in the next GC model releases from the UKMO and will help to inform future development activities through the outcomes of activities such as PEGs In turn, this will lead to more accurate and reliable model configurations available from UKMO for future versions of ACCESS-S. This will ensure that model development which prioritizes skill gains over Australia is included in model releases, ultimately leading to better forecasts for agriculture and the Australian public.