Speakers: Doerte Jakob, Chun Hsu Su, Nathan Eizenberg, Peter Steinle.

Video connection details (Note the change) Name: Bureau of Meteorology – R&D Seminars.
Video Address – Bureau Internal:  558912. External Participants: 558912@bom.gov.au. PIN:  3099#.
Audio Connection: +61 3 9900 8912

The Bureau of Meteorology Atmospheric high-resolution Regional Reanalysis for Australia (BARRA) is the first of its kind for the Australian region. The Bureau of Meteorology is making a major investment into this new dataset because of the important benefits it offers to Australia. Reanalysis datasets are extremely valuable because they provide a consistent method of analysing the atmosphere over a number of years or decades giving greater understanding of the weather over Australia, including extreme events. This greater understanding allows for better planning and management to reduce risks for the future.

The regional reanalysis suite is based on the Australian Community Climate Earth-System Simulator (ACCESS) which is developed in close collaboration between the Bureau, CSIRO and Australian universities. The region covered by the reanalysis, shown below, is the Australian continent, and the surrounding region including parts of southeast Asia, New Zealand, and south to the ice edge of the Antarctic continent.

The reanalysis over the Australian domain is provided with a resolution of approximately 12 km and extends over 70 levels up to 80 km into the atmosphere. For a small number of subdomains, the 12-km reanalysis is downscaled to a 1.5 km resolution. BARRA offers higher resolution in space and time than existing global reanalyses and has been developed specifically for Australia.

About 100 parameters are archived at hourly (and some at 10 minute) time intervals. This includes information about surface conditions (such as temperature, precipitation, wind speed and direction, humidity, evaporation and soil moisture) and at pressure and model levels as well as information on solar radiation and cloud cover.