Dr Romain Beucher1, Felicity Chun1, Charles Turner1, Marc White1, Clare Richards1, Owen Kaluza1, Kelsey Druken1, Yousong Zeng1
1ACCESS-NRI, Canberra, Australia
Biography:
Romain is the Leader of the ACCESS-NRI Model Evaluation and Diagnostics. He is highly experienced in data exploration and analysis where he provides technical support, develops open-source software solutions and provides training to facilitate effective research and development of workflows.
Romain’s favorite aspect of his work is working with smart people on highly interesting and relevant topics as well as learning from them.
Romain has 12 years research experience working on world-leading computational geoscience research groups in France, Norway and Australia. He is a former member of the technological development stream of the Australian Research Council Basin Genesis Hub (BGH).
Romain has a strong educational background in natural sciences as well as in physics and chemistry. He obtained a PhD from the University of Grenoble, France titled “Neogene Evolution of the south-Western Alps (French-Italian border): An integrated sismotectonic and thermochronological approach”.
Outside work, Romain enjoys spending time his family and friends. He likes cooking, running and fiddling with computers and code, as well as slowly improving his guitar playing.
Abstract:
The Australian climate science community is preparing for the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 7 (CMIP7), a global initiative to advance climate modelling. CMIP enables systematic evaluation of climate models by comparing outputs with observations and with other models, helping identify strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement.
ACCESS-NRI is addressing the technical and scientific challenges of CMIP7 preparation by developing a flexible, reproducible evaluation framework. This includes integrating international tools such as ESMValTool and ILAMB, and creating notebook-based diagnostic recipes that target key climate processes like ENSO and the IOD. Significant work is also underway to ensure model outputs meet CMIP standards for structure, metadata, and variable naming, simplifying integration into evaluation workflows.
A major priority is improving access to observational datasets and model outputs on high-performance computing systems. ACCESS-NRI is building infrastructure to streamline the discovery and loading of these data into evaluation tools, ensuring transparency, reproducibility, and adaptability across different scientific goals.
This work aligns with the CMIP7 Assessment Fast Track Rapid Evaluation Framework (CMIP7 AFT REF), a WCRP-supported initiative designed to deliver rapid and robust performance assessments for models contributing to the seventh IPCC Assessment Report (AR7). REF will play a critical role in supporting timely and coordinated international climate science.
This presentation will outline the key infrastructure and data challenges involved and highlight ACCESS-NRI’s coordinated approach to sustainable CMIP7 model evaluation. It will also showcase the ongoing development of interactive 3D visualisation tools for enhanced interpretation of model results.