Grant Smith2, Alberto Meucci3,1, Mx Claire Trenham1, Stefan Zieger2, Claire Spillman2, Ron Hoeke1, Bryan Hally1, Emilio Echevarria1, Vanessa Hernaman1, Blake Seers1
1CSIRO, Australia, 2Australian Bureau of Meteorology, Australia, 3University of Melbourne, Australia
Biography:
Claire Trenham is a Senior Experimental Scientist leading the Coastal Extremes Modelling & Projections team within CSIRO’s Climate Intelligence program, and is the Digital and Data representative.
Claire Trenham joined CSIRO in 2011 working on wave climate modelling for Australian, Pacific and global contexts. After a period working as Senior Research Data Services Specialist for the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) in Canberra between 2014-2017, Claire returned to CSIRO.
Claire specialises in coastal extremes modelling, littoral and wave modelling, regional climate projections, data management, data optimisation and data publishing, and other climate data work across the research unit.
https://orcid.org/my-orcid?orcid=0000-0003-4258-9936
Abstract:
A new wave hindcast dataset is available known as WHACS (Wave Hindcast for the Australian Climate Service) which updates the now 15-year-old CAWCR Wave Hindcast with improved model physics, inputs, and resolution.
The Australian Climate Service is a partnership made up of world leading science and expertise from the Bureau of Meteorology, Geoscience Australia, CSIRO and Australian Bureau of Statistics. It brings the Commonwealth’s extensive climate and natural hazard information into a single national view. The WHACS product is part of the Coastal and Flooding Hazards work package.
The new hindcast updates the CAWCR product with a newer version of WaveWatchIII, a different parameterisation of model physics, and higher resolution atmospheric forcing data (ERA5 reanalysis). The new product leverages a “spherical multi-cell grid” structure to achieve resolutions of ~7km in coastal regions globally, and ~¼degree in the global open ocean, with an expanded set of locations with spectral data output.
The model was carefully tuned to respond more strongly to extreme winds in line with the forcing data being used tending to under-represent winds in extreme situations like tropical cyclones. This leads to better validation performance against in-situ and remotely sensed observations compared to the CAWCR wave hindcast.
The initial data release covers the period 1979-2023, we plan to operationalise it and eventually retire the CAWCR wave hindcast.
In this talk we will discuss the differences and improvements in the new data product, with a focus on data structure optimisation undertaken to vastly improve performance of the data for users.