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BARRA v1.0: Kilometre-scale downscaling of an Australian regional atmospheric reanalysis over four midlatitude domains

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journal contribution
posted on 2023-05-21, 11:55 authored by Su, CH, Eizenberg, N, Jakob, D, Paul Fox-HughesPaul Fox-Hughes, Steinle, P, Christopher White, Franklin, C
Regional reanalyses provide a dynamically consistent recreation of past weather observations at scales useful for local-scale environmental applications. The development of convection-permitting models (CPMs) in numerical weather prediction has facilitated the creation of kilometre-scale (1-4 km) regional reanalysis and climate projections. The Bureau of Meteorology Atmospheric high-resolution Regional Reanalysis for Australia (BARRA) also aims to realize the benefits of these high-resolution models over Australian sub-regions for applications such as fire danger research by nesting them in BARRA's 12 km regional reanalysis (BARRA-R). Four midlatitude sub-regions are centred on Perth in Western Australia, Adelaide in South Australia, Sydney in New South Wales (NSW), and Tasmania. The resulting 29-year 1.5 km downscaled reanalyses (BARRA-C) are assessed for their added skill over BARRA-R and global reanalyses for near-surface parameters (temperature, wind, and precipitation) at observation locations and against independent 5 km gridded analyses. BARRA-C demonstrates better agreement with point observations for temperature and wind, particularly in topographically complex regions and coastal regions. BARRA-C also improves upon BARRA-R in terms of the intensity and timing of precipitation during the thunderstorm seasons in NSW and spatial patterns of sub-daily rain fields during storm events. BARRA-C reflects known issues of CPMs: overestimation of heavy rain rates and rain cells, as well as underestimation of light rain occurrence. As a hindcast-only system, BARRA-C largely inherits the domain-averaged bias pattern from BARRA-R but does produce different climatological extremes for temperature and precipitation. An added-value analysis of temperature and precipitation extremes shows that BARRA-C provides additional skill over BARRA-R when compared to gridded observations. The spatial patterns of BARRA-C warm temperature extremes and wet precipitation extremes are more highly correlated with observations. BARRA-C adds value in the representation of the spatial pattern of cold extremes over coastal regions but remains biased in terms of magnitude.

History

Publication title

Geoscientific Model Development

Volume

14

Issue

7

Pagination

4357-4378

ISSN

1991-959X

Department/School

School of Geography, Planning and Spatial Sciences

Publisher

Copernicus GmbH

Place of publication

Germany

Rights statement

Copyright 2021 The Authors Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Repository Status

  • Open

Socio-economic Objectives

Atmospheric processes and dynamics; Other environmental management not elsewhere classified

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