Meeting Minutes 2025: Atmosphere Working Group

[heidi (Heidi Nettelbeck, ACCESS-NRI Atmosphere Modelling Team Lead)]

Notes from each meeting of the Atmosphere Working Group held in 2025 are added as a reply to this topic.

Make each reply a wiki post , that way other attendees can edit the notes. This can greatly reduce the burden of note-taking allowing that person to participate fully in discussions without worrying too much about missing important details.

[cbengel (Chermelle Engel)]

Atmosphere WG Meeting 12.02.2025 minutes
12 Feb 2025
26 participants on Zoom
From: UNSW, BoM, Monash, ACCESS-NRI, CSIRO, UTas

Science talk – Free-running tests with the NRI-version of the Regional Nesting Suite by Matt Lipson

• Mat mentioned that the talk would be more technical than scientific talk due to where we are at. Using Spare SU last year, Mat pulled together ancillaries and ran nested 1km simulations centered over Sydney.

  • Weather resources (off-shore wind energy generation)
  • Heat/breeze impacts (Negin)
  • Heavy Precipitation (Jason Evans) compared to his WRF runs. Domains were chosen to align with WRF runs.

• Different setup to ACCESS-NRI Lismore tutorial.

  • Added an intermediate step at 5km.
  • Chermelle managed to get daily varying SST data working. Daily varying SST was thus included in the test. Mat found it easy to use.
  • Free-running, no cycling. Runs for 1 month.
  • Tested the two options: ERA5-land and BARRA-R2 land/surface initial conditions (ICs) in the ACCESS-NRI suite.

• Results:

  • Mat compared how variables evolved when intialised with Era5-land or Barra-R2
  • Projections were compared to the BARRA-R2 reanalysis
  • Soil moisture: ERA5-land initial soil moisture wetter than BARRA-R2.
  • Projection initialised with BARRA-R2 remained drier than that initialised with ERA5-land (at 12km)
  • Within 1km inner nest, over the entire simulation period the soil moistures (top-layer) aligned with each other.
  • Latent Heat flux: More moisture going into the atmosphere from wetter ERA5-land IC than BARRA-R2 IC.
  • Air temperature: For 12km domain, all simulations tracked closely to observations (256 sites throughout QLD/NSW/TAS, but BARRA-R2 land/surface initialised product aligned better with observations). Similarly for 12km/5km/1km.
    • Animation of air-temp through the month at 1km
    • Urban effects: Urban heat island in the evening.
    • Sea-breeze effects.
    • Timing of things like change in cold fronts was ok. Sometimes an hour late.
  • Domain averaged air temperature: AWS locations were shown as coloured dots. The color difference between the AWS dot and the background indicate obs/projection differences.
    • Overall, from diurnal profile, difference between BARRA was 0.5 due to slightly drier initialisation.
    • Not clear which land/surface initialised run was better. Expected that BARRA land/surface ICs would perfom better. Need to do more testing.
  • Andrew Brown will analyse edge-effects.

• Concluding remarks: Thinking about reducing size of outer domain or removing 5km domain. Suite is easy to run; hardest part is setting up STASH. There is no automatic conversion to netcdf, but there are ACCESS-NRI tools available (e.g., um2nc) which could work for the regional suite. Mat and Chermelle are talking about a GCM-driven nesting suite.
  For details about setup see this GitHub page.

• Questions/Answers

  • Qinggang: How much grid of the boundary do you remove? In previous work he removed 10% of the grid.
    Mat: not removing any yet, but that will change.
  • Claire: interested in the lower boundary condition of SST versus land. The land boundary was initialised at the start and was left to run. Was the SST boundary changed every 6 hours?
    Mat: the SST changed every day.
    Claire: Did it change with a jump?
    Mat: Yes, and the diurnal change during the day is missing.
  • Peter: is there any nudging going on?
    Mat: no.
    Peter: Could be interesting to further investigate for the energy fluxes at the surface and investigate the energy balance.
    Chermelle: Surprised at how close the projects where when initialised with ERA5-land versus BARRA-R2. Is anyone else?
    Mat: yes.
    Peter: Mat probably needs to look in more detail.
    Mat: yes

Tech talk – An introduction to ACCESS-Vis: Visualisation tools released to date and current work in progress by Owen Kaluza

• Yi introduced Owen: “If you want to make your data come to life, Owen is a person who can show you the tricks”.
  Owen is a senior Research Software Engineer working in the MedTeam at ACCESS-NRI, specialising in visualisation. His aim is to produce showpiece visualisations for ACCESS-NRI.
  He tends to work in python and uses tools that researchers use; focus on open-source tools.
  Also uses GPU acceleration.

• There are three repositories:

  1. ACCESS-Vis, which is available on Github and on the ACCESS-MED conda environment conda/access-med-0.12
  • ACCESS-Vis provides a canvas to render earth system data; based on the LavaVu python visualisation library.
  • Use on ARE with a gpuvolta queue using the conda/access-med-0.12 access-med conda module.
  2. ACCESS-Visualisation-Recipes
  • A collection of notebooks; showed simple concepts of the library,. E.g., position of the sun for proper rendering on the blue marble (rather than having a light shining on a default position in the animation).
  • When you import the library you can select the resolution you want to run it at. You can start at a lower resolution when setting up then switch to a higher resolution for higher quality animations. There are examples for other options.
  • Can create images in a Jupyter Notebook; examples are given in the repository. Can also look at the source code to get better understanding.
  • Monthly textures available from Blue Marble, but also possible to use an interpolation between different months. Other notebooks demonstrate other features.
  • Owen plans to release more examples for visualisation and is open to feedback or feature requests.
  3. AUS2200 visualisations.
  • The images are designed to look like satellite images.
  • A particle tracer is available that drops particles and advects them. Owen showed an example. The particles have random lifetime and are replaced when they go out of the boundary.
  • Owen also showed an example of clouds with wind vectors from AUS2200. There were jumps due to re-intialisations. Owen asked for other datasets or suggestions of data to plot.

• Questions/Answers:

  • Mat: Are we able to access the notebook and run ourselves?
    Owen: The last plot “will” be, it has not been added yet.
  • Charmaine: It is complicated to plot the 3D wind vectors? She gave a link to an example of work she was doing with Drew Whitehouse to produce visualisations of cloud-rain and 3D winds. She was happy to help.
  • Qinggang: when you position the sun right does involve some assumption that when the sun is in the domain is gets light?
    Owen: we are positioning the sunlight so it looks like it does in satellite images. It will affect light falling on an image that is being produced, but it’s not a correct physical model.
  • Qinggang: At midnight can you still see data?
    Owen: Yes, and you can adjust the ambient lighting and diffusion, etc.

2025 ACCESS Workshop: Heidi Nettelbeck (5-10mins)

• This year the workshop will be held in Melbourne in early September. The workshop committee would like to schedule parallel science sessions. The Working Group would like to hear from the Atmosphere community what those sessions could look like. Any ideas?
  You can also post comments on the forum.

• Comments:

  • Peter: having single sesssions help sharing of ideas.
  • Heidi: Parallel sessions could focus on things relevant across other WGs (e.g., Atmosphere, Ocean, Land, etc.).
  • Charmaine: one thing to think about is a regional coupled model. We could do a joint session to discuss needs from both sides.
  • Yi: Interactions are important with land as well.
  • Heidi: any other thoughts? Like Owen’s talk, maybe a cross-tools session?
  • Yi: There are also new users working on atmospheric chemistry.

Compute/storage resources - Atmosphere WG: Heidi Nettelbeck

• Any Experiment proposals for Q1/2025? We have 875 kSU allocation this quarter.
  Heidi gave a demo on how to apply for Atmosphere WG Resources.

Next Atmosphere WG meeting:

• 19 March 2025 @ 11:30am

[Paul.Gregory]

Atmosphere WG Meeting 19.03.2025 minutes
19 March 2025
27 participants on Zoom
Matt Woodhouse convening.

Updates from WG Chairs.
Heidi:

• ACCESS-NRI are about to release a configuration of the Regional Nesting Suite ACCESS-rAM3 (beta release).

Charmaine:

• New starter at BoM. Ian White. Working on ACCESS-A/AE km scale systems.
• Working with met office on RAL3/Lfric. Lfric is the replacement for the UM. We will be running that RAL3 for three domains for high impact weather case studies.

Yi:

• AUS2200 project research is ongoing using the model datasets. Black summer case study has been published in JGR atmosphere. The first major publication from the AUS2200 data. Other papers are in draft. Thanks for the community support.
• In 21stCenturyWeather we are discussing running larger simulations. A ‘flagship’ simulation using NRI and rAM3. Discussions are ongoing.
• Trying to get AM3 running with Cable at ~25 km spacing (N512). Cable ancillaries are currently only available at 1 degrees.
• We have some new ECRs.
  • Ian W. Originally from the UK, now at BoM w/Charmaine.
  • Qingqand Gao. From Cambridge PhD, now post-doc with Yi at Unimelb. Looking at low clouds in hi-res, convective permitting models. Looking at BARRA-R2 and C2. Working with Chun-Hsu at BoM.
  • Alanah Chapman. Working with Yi, Matt, Robyn and Sonya on AM3. Looking at southern ocean clouds, specifically sources of dimethyl sulphide and sea ice melt.
  • Nasim Aln. Starting post-doc with Steven Zim and Monash. Wanting to run ACCESS-UM examining convection schemes and transition from shallow to open convection.
  • ANU students Emma, et al. working with Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick.

Topics for ACCESS workshop in September 2025:
Jasmeen:

• User training team at ACCESS-NRI has created a training topics poll
• Please fill out - should take only 2-3 minutes. Feedback is greatly appreciated!

Comment From Paul Leopardi :

• Looking for extra technical requests/ material for training days for breakout rooms. UKMO is upgrading suites to cylc8 and Github. Fab etc. The Momentum User workshop runs before ours, these will be included in our community workshop.

Christian Stassen science talk: Added value (AV) of regional models over Australia

• RCMs improve many outputs from GCMs.
• But they have their own set of problems, i.e. the remaining parameterisations.
• RCMs over Australia are still not km-scale convection resolving.
• Comparing BARPA-R (~17 km) and CCAM12 (~12.5 km), both with model tops at ~40 km, against ERA5 + 8 X CMIP6 models downscaled
• Comparing GCM and RCM historical runs against observations from 1985-2014, looking at MSE, bias and correlation.
• Looking at metrics at two different length scales to avoid double-penalty problem (e.g. penalised with spatial error sin extreme precipitation events at higher resolution, which GCMs can’t even simulate)
• We upscale RCM to GCM, and interpolate GCM to RCM.
• Looking at Hot, cold, wet and dry extremes.
• RCM improves tasmax over most of Australia, but struggles with Tmin and precip over SE Australia
• Generally BARPA and CCAM add value at GCM scale. ‘Drizzle problem’ in GCM is improved, so RCMs give AV in number of drought days.
• BARPA and CCAM add vallue at RCM length scale.

Q : Martin. Can you say whether RCMs make bad GCMs less bad, and good GCMs better?

A: Not much AV for ERA5 and Euro-Earth as these are already at fairly hi-res. We do improve MPI models but some biases (e.g. cold bias) can’t be removed by CCAM. It is metric and model dependent.

Q : Matt. A preprint yet?
A: Don’t know. I’ve been away for the past week! Will let you know.

Matt - a preprint in the minutes would be great.

Paul Gregory : Showing 21st Century Weather Wiki on introductory rose/cylc training for new ACCESS-UM users.

See Introduction to Rose/Cylc — 21st Century Weather Software Wiki

Q : Chermelle. Be careful with out suite ids. Please remove Scott’s suite and waite for rAM3.
A : Sure, no probs.

Q : Davide. Overlapping with NRI and Hive docs.
A : Will link to existing documentation where ever possible so there is only one, supported and maintained, source of truth within the community.

Q : Heidi. Reach out to me and Davide as we maintain the Hive docs.
Q : Paul L. Keep in mind migration , e.g. cycl 8 and github, rosie migration.

Martin Dix : AM3 updates

• Uses updated UM and CABLE and will eventually become ESM3
• Using GM GA9 with CABLE instead of JULES.
• Running at N96. Issues with CABLE ancilliary generation at higher resolution.
• Unifying CABLE science code to a common library.
• Some CABLE science improvements which also apply to ESM1.6
• Hoping to have alpha release soon.
• CABLE development is on github.
• AM3 development on private github repo. Better than MOSRS and svn.
• Can’t wait for UKMO to transition to github. So much better than MOSRS and svn.
• Will we backport to MOSRS UM, JULES and roses repos? Feedback sought.
• Next step - Evaluation of AM3 and extendend simulation with CM3 (with JULES, MOM6 and CICE).
• Adopt new NRI built and test framework (already used for OM3)
• Ideally we want CABLE in a version or rAM3. First with UM, then with Lfric.

Q: From Matt W. Switching on chemistry?
A : Need to check surface deposition and UKCA stuff. Can be messy w/different vegetation types. Should be a single switch in the same way.

Q : Matthew Lipson. Land working group is moving to workflows for UM ancillary generation. Are you working with Claire to align with us?
A : Existing methods will work for high-res global, but we will need to move to other sources for high-res km-scale. We are looking at CCI now. We are using ANTS suite.

Heidi - ACCESS-rAM3 (beta-release) and WG compute resources

• Watch Hive Docs for documentation on new beta-release of ACCESS-rAM3.**
• Please apply for WG resources. We didn’t use all our quarterly kSUs. If you have a good case for suite testing, please put on experiment category of atmosphere for resources you want. See here for how to apply for Atmosphere WG Resources.

Next WG meeting: April dates? Let us know about any community conference/workshops to avoid clashes