Announce Atmosphere Working Group 2025 (Archived)

Atmosphere Working Group
12

!! Reminder: Atmosphere WG meeting 23.07.2025

For a calendar invite, simply click on the relevant calendar link below

Agenda:

  1. Admin: Volunteer for taking today’s meeting minutes to post here on the Forum.

  2. Brief update from WG co-chairs and ACCESS-NRI: Yi Huang, Charmaine Franklin, Matt Woodhouse, Heidi Nettelbeck (5mins)

  3. Science talk: (15+5mins)

    • Exploring regional LFRic simulations for Australian case studies Charmaine Franklin, Ian White, Vinod Kumar and Belinda Roux
      The BoM is testing the next-generation regional model (LFRic) to assess its performance under Australian conditions. This effort supports the development of a research-ready regional configuration that integrates the latest science from the third version of the Regional Atmosphere and Land (RAL3) configuration, with the LFRic infrastructure and the GungHo dynamical core; all key components of the UK Met Office (UKMO)'s Next Generation Modelling System. This talk will highlight some key results from the BoM’s early assessment of RAL3-LFRic for both the Melbourne and Darwin domains run at 1.5km horizontal resolution. This is performed as part of a broader collaboration with the UKMO. Significant technical work has enabled side-by-side comparisons between RAL3-LFRic, and the current UKMO Unified Model also configured with RAL3 (RAL3-UM). An important focus has been on understanding model behaviour and performance in capturing Australian weather conditions. Case studies run and analysed include high-impact weather events that have occurred over Australia in recent years: tropical cyclone Tiffany in 2022, a frontal system that brought widespread heavy rainfall and damaging winds in June 2021, and heat waves in 2020 and 2025. Such case studies provide the basis for evaluating the readiness of RAL3-LFRic for Australian applications.

  4. Short talk: (10+2mins)

    • Towards a climatology of sea breezes around Australia from high-resolution atmospheric model data Andrew Brown
      The sea breeze circulation is a mesoscale atmospheric process that can be important for human health and offshore wind energy, while also potentially providing a source of convective initiation in coastal regions. The importance of the sea breeze has resulted in many climatological studies around the world, including in Australia. However, these climatologies are limited to small regions due to having a specific sea breeze definition for a particular coastline of interest. This includes assuming a fixed direction, timing, and intensity for the local sea breeze circulation. Andrew will discuss development and testing of general sea breeze detection methods that can be applied to any coastline and model data. An accepted method for sea breeze detection from model data does not yet exist, to his knowledge, in the literature. He will also present spatial maps of Australian sea breeze occurrences based on several candidate methods applied to 6 months of atmospheric model datasets, including a high-resolution km-scale configuration of ACCESS, and a regional and global reanalysis (BARRA and ERA5).

  5. ACCESS Workshop 2025 (8-12 September): Heidi Nettelbeck (15mins)

    Atmosphere WG annual meeting on Friday 12 September

    • Need your input on agenda/discussion ideas
      - RAL-LFRic discussion session?

  6. ACCESS-NRI Visualisation Project - Call for EOI: Heidi Nettelbeck (5mins)

    • ACCESS-NRI is inviting expressions of interest from domain experts and researchers who would like to collaborate on a 3-month visualisation project. We’re offering technical support and expert guidance to help you bring your science to life. See here for more details.

  7. Compute/storage resources: Heidi Nettelbeck (5mins)
    Any experiment proposals for Q3/2025 (875 kSU allocation)?
    → See here for how to apply for Atmosphere WG Resources.

  8. AUS2200 input files: Paul Gregory (1min)
    Paul wants to run AUS2200 for a few hours to benchmark the I/O performance. If anyone has any stored input files (ancils, LBCs, grib start-dumps etc) could they please contact him.

  9. Next Atmosphere WG meeting: Atmosphere WG annual meeting, ACCESS Workshop 12.09.2025