We’ve been a bit remiss at cross-posting minutes from our High-res Global AM3 meetings recently. Here is the latest from Monday 1 March, 2026.
Note some of the links point to posts on our 21st Century Weather forum, Cumulus. All in the weather and climate community are welcome to join Cumulus, just send an email to julie.arblaster at monash.edu and we’ll add you.
Minutes 1 March 2026
Attending: Paola Corrales, Shixue Li, Julie Arblaster, Martin Dix, Mat Lipson, Bethan White, Heidi Nettelbeck
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Pao: reconfiguration of initial conditions from N96 to N512 now works, though need to run some additional scripts to fix some bad values at the north pole for the model to run. Pao tried all the different types of interpolation in the reconfiguration code but none worked directly. Now posted as an issue by Martin for something requiring fixing long-term.
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Confirmed that we will do a 1-year run at N512 which will act as our control for various tests. The experimental set-up uses:
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initial conditions: the N96 restarts reconfigured to N512 for the initial conditions
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boundary conditions: identical to N96 i.e. Reynolds OI SSTs/sea-ice which are daily at 0.25 deg resolution, land surface ancillaries (NCAR), urban scheme will be turned off, 4-D ozone. The one difference to the N96 experiment is the use of climatological aerosols vs prognostic due to computational expense
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use the n512e code (which is the latest code, e = endgame) and these branches:
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n96: https://github.com/21centuryweather/access-am3-configs/tree/dev-n96e-aeroclim
n512: https://github.com/21centuryweather/access-am3-configs/tree/dev-n512-aeroclim
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STASH: @paocorrales modified STASH list based on everyones feedback. In consultation with the weather systems group, agreed to post-process multi-level fields to 0.5 deg resolution to save space
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year: agreed on the year 2008 to feed into the ENSO experiments planned
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ACTION: @martin.dix to run N96 AM3 AMIP run ASAP so we have initial conditions for 2008
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ACTION: @paocorrales to request 16 kSU for these experiments this quarter using project fy29
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proposed test runs (climatological vs time varying aerosols, CCI vs NCAR land ancillaries) to compare to this control: AM3 test runs - Google Sheets. Please populate/edit and we will highlight and pin in a new topic for easier reference
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feedback on alpha release due by today but Martin/Lachlan said the end of the week is fine. We discussed some suggestions for improved documentation (e.g. how to run with climatological aerosols). Also discussed the ‘future developments’ section listed (see hive post here which includes an N512 configuration. We agreed to highlight via the hive our keen interest in the N512 configuration and urban scheme being included in the beta release.
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Post-script: @paocorrales mentioned after the meeting that CABLE fields soil moisture, soil temperature, snow density etc do not get reconfigured automatically. The fix_cable_initial_conditions_6l.py code translates the JULES STASH output (that are generated by the reconfiguration code at N512) to CABLE STASH fields. Since some fields are not available in JULES, the N512 soil/snow variables are not always initialised properly. For a cleaner comparison between N96 and N512, we should also use the fix_cable_inital_conditions_6l.py code to create the N96 CABLE STASH fields