Version 1 of the Aus400 dataset has been released for community use. This dataset is from a simulation using a regional version (v11.4) of the Met Office unified model (the atmosphere component of The Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator, ACCESS) with 400m grid spacing over all of Australia. The dataset is the culmination of a collaborative project between the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes, Bureau of Meteorology, and National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) Australia.
The dataset covers a 60-hour period, commencing March 26, 2017, with 3D variables output at one-hour resolution and 2D variables at 10-minute resolution. This period covers the landfall of Severe Tropical Cyclone Debbie, the passage of a cold front over southern Australia, and severe storms over other parts of the continent. Also included are data from a 2.2 km grid spacing domain, which was used as an intermediate nest between the driving data (BARRA reanalysis) and the 400m domain. The 400m domain has more than 12.6 billion grid points, and at its completion was the largest simulation with the Unified Model ever conducted.
These data are being released to allow the scientific community to explore this state-of-the-art simulation for their chosen application, conduct research into small-scale atmospheric processes and multi-scale interactions, develop new methods to analyse large datasets, etc. It is free for anyone to use or access, but we would be keen to collaborate with interested users and be kept informed of your activities and progress. We will hold a workshop to facilitate communication and collaboration on the use of these data in the future.
Information on data access is available here. Further information about the run can be found on the CMS wiki, here. The Python cookbook for working with the data at NCI is available here. Contributions are welcome.
A workshop to discuss first results from the analysis of the simulations is planned for February/March 2021. Please contact Christian Jakob (christian.jakob@monash.edu) to attend.