Anna Ukkola: How well can we simulate land surface processes across Australia?
Many impacts of climate change are felt through land surface processes which also modulate the weather and climate processes around us. Land surface models that represent these processes are an integral part of climate models and inform us about many policy-relevant questions including future water resources, carbon uptake and ecosystem processes.
The Australian climate research community currently relies primarily on two LSMs: CABLE and JULES. Despite their widespread use, no comprehensive evaluation and intercomparison of these models has yet been undertaken across Australia. A collaboration between several universities, the Bureau of Meteorology, and the ACCESS-NRI Land Working Group is preparing a coordinated comparison of CABLE and JULES to assess their relative strengths and weaknesses in simulating Australia’s water, carbon, and energy cycles, and to identify priorities for future model development. We are seeking community input to help shape the evaluation framework and maximise its value to both model developers and users. Key questions include: What input datasets and model configurations are most appropriate for an apples-to-apples comparison? Which variables, processes, and timescales should be prioritised for evaluation? What observational datasets can provide the most robust constraints on model performance across Australia’s diverse climates and ecosystems?