2014 REPORT SUMMARY The ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science combines five Australian universities and multiple outstanding national and international Partner Organisations. Established in July 2011, we receive extensive investment from the Australian Research Council (ARC), the University of New South Wales, the Department of the Environment, New South Wales Government, Monash University, the Australian National University, the University of Melbourne, and the University of Tasmania. We have strong links with, and ongoing support from, CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM). Our goal is to resolve key uncertainties undermining the reliable projection of Australia’s climate. We are transforming the scale and quality of climate system science in Australian universities, linked with national and international partners. We
The role of land surface forcing and feedbacks for regional climate Drivers of spatial and temporal climate variability in extratropical Australia Mechanisms and attribution of past and future ocean circulation change. Most of our work is linked to the Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator (ACCESS). This is a collaborative effort by BoM, the CSIRO, and the university community. To help researchers use petascale computers, and to handle multi-petascale data sets, we have an expert Computational Modelling Support (CMS) team.
Our research will improve future climate projections, particularly at regional scales. We conduct the basic science to minimise Australia’s economic, social and environmental vulnerability to climate change. We undertake world-class research focused contribute to several Strategic Research Priorities, most obviously “Living in a on climate system science; Changing Environment”, via provision of integrate our research with national and improved knowledge of how our environment is changing in terms of natural international partners; and human-linked systems. Our work make sure our students enjoy also aligns with “Managing Our Food and high-quality training, a strongly supWater Assets” and “Lifting Productivity and portive environment and access to all Economic Growth” by developing gradpossible opportunities. uates with skills relevant to a 21st century economy. Climate system science is a quantitative science built on physics and mathematics. We This report provides brief details on our partner with the National Computational 2014 activities. Full details are available at Infrastructure Facility (NCI) to support our our website: www.climatescience.org.au modelling, and with the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) to help us meet our data challenges. We have five research themes: The effects of tropical convection on Australia’s climate Risks, mechanisms, and attribution of changes in Australian climate extremes SUMMARY OF REPORT 2014 ARC CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE FOR CLIMATE SYSTEM SCIENCE
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Science Impact
We published 178 peer-reviewed journal papers. Of these 87% were in leading international journals. Highlights include papers in Nature (17), Science (2), Geophysical Research Letters (17), J. Geophysical Research (20), J. Climate (21) and J. Physical Oceanography (7) Research in the Centre of Excellence has led to a series of important discoveries, including: Helping explain the warming hiatus via ocean and wind processes How clouds near the surface help explain differences in future warming between models Demonstration that the warming hiatus has not slowed extreme temperatures increases Nature paper highlighting model development priorities Discovery of how land-atmosphere coupling and tropical deforestation interrelate First calculation of how nutrient fluxes vary through the Indonesian Throughflow First sub-mesoscale simulations of the South Indian Ocean demonstrate how the fine-scale oceanic structure induces vertical motion. Multidisciplinary research has led to major progress on understanding extremes linked to global warming, land cover change and variability. We have published multiple papers including contributions to a special issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society on extreme events. The Centre has generated significant new data sets for use by the national and international science community. Major highlights include the multiple data sets published from both ACCESS
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ARC CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE FOR CLIMATE SYSTEM SCIENCE SUMMARY OF REPORT 2014
and regional projections via the Earth System Grid and via Research Data Australia (RDA). Our links with The Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research (CAWCR) has strengthened. CAWCR contributed strongly to the Centre’s winter school, to our annual workshop and to several one- to three-day workshops. We have contributed strongly to CAWCR workshops on model evaluation and ACCESS. With support from RDA and ANDS we published results from ACCESS1.3 for the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project – Phase 5 (CMIP-5). These simulations of global climate over the period 1850-2005 using the ACCESS model have been completed in collaboration with CAWCR and supported by NCI. With CAWCR, an exciting new joint research program focused on the climate of the Maritime Continent is being developed. We plan to alleviate major systemic biases in climate models. We have continued to drive ahead at the interface of science, modelling, high performance computing and software engineering. Simulations for the atmosphere have been carried out at resolutions of one kilometre and higher in our study of convective processes. The Oceans research program team further developed a model at ¼° resolution for global applications. Via collaboration with the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory we have made good progress towards a model with 0.1° global resolution. This provides new and unprecedented opportunities for examining many observed phenomena in much greater detail and provides guidance on how to represent these phenomena in global climate models.
We welcomed 36 visitors from overseas and close to 70 visits were made by Centre staff to overseas institutions. Lisa Alexander began a new leadership position in the World Climate Research Program Grand Challenge on Extremes. Todd Lane is the new President of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (AMOS). Elections to scientific societies included Matthew England (Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science), Neville Nicholls (Fellow of the American Geophysical Union), Ross Griffies (Fellow of the American Physical Society) and Andy Pitman (Fellow of AMOS). Major national and international prizes: Andy Hogg (Fofonoff Award, American Meteorological Soc.), Ann Henderson-Sellers (Winner, Global class, 100 Women of Influence), Nerilie Abram (Dorothy Hill Award, Australian Academy of Science), Steve Griffies (Fridtjof Nansen Medal, European Geophysical Union), Trevor McDougall (Jaeger Medal, Australian Academy of Science), David Karoly (Morton Medal, AMOS), Sophie Lewis (AMOS Early Career Researcher Award) and Hoshin Gupta (John Dalton Medal, European Geophysical Union) Five new Discovery Early Career Researcher Awards to Centre-affiliated researchers: Ailie Gallant, Max Nikurashin, Markus Donat, Paul Spence, Laurie Menviel There were successful ARC Discovery and ARC Linkage grant winners and a successful Linkage, Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities (LIEF) grant. A full list of our 2014 publications is available at: www.climatescience.org.au/content/ publication
Capacity Building & Impact: National Influence We made a significant submission to the Senate Enquiry into Australia’s Innovation System. Chief Investigators provided several briefings to Federal and State governments on topics such as emissions reductions, the strategic value of NCI, and climate adaptation. ACCESS v1.3, including CABLE, is now easily accessible and configurable by the Centre’s researchers. We strongly supported the Department of the Environment’s “Implementing Climate Science in Australia” plan by contributing to multiple science deliverables through code development, data-set publication and journal publications. Through significant and sustained links with CAWCR, we continue to enhance cooperation at a national scale through research, graduate training and international connectivity. An ACCESS model hierarchy with different complexities has been completed and includes the K-Profile Parameterization ocean model. This hierarchy will allow a full range of scientific research to be pursued using the ACCESS framework. A list of currently available configurations is hosted at: http://climate-cms.unsw.wikispaces. net/ListOfExperiments. The Centre represented the interests of Climate System Science via membership of the Australian Research Data Infrastructure Strategy, and the Steering Committee and Advisory Committees of the Weather and Climate Laboratory project of the National e-Research, Tools and Collaboration Research (NeCTAR) project. We are represented on the National Committee for Earth System Science and National Committee for Data in Science. We provided advice to the Natural Resource Management Projections Steering Committee for the Department of the Environment.
We gave multiple briefings to businesses, company boards, and representatives of State and Federal Government. Many Centre researchers continue to actively support and engage with AMOS, including the annual national conference.
Capacity Building & Impact: Education We increased our affiliated PhD students to 74 – from 44 in 2012 and 50 in 2013. Nineteen students completed their degrees in 2014, with 11 students submitting their PhD theses. Graduate destinations included Columbia, Princeton, Oxford, NASA, BoM, IFM-GEOMAR, and our own Centre. Our Graduate Director led further development of our graduate program via winter schools, writing workshops, and mentoring. Lectures from our winter schools are now available on the Centre’s YouTube channel. Our third winter school for students was held in the Research School of Earth Sciences, at the ANU. Focused on geophysical fluid dynamics, 48 participants attended, with seven participants from outside of ARCCSS universities, including two from the University of the South Pacific. We once again offered Centre-wide undergraduate summer scholarships to attract new students. Fourteen scholarships were awarded for students to work on six-week research projects supervised by Centre early career researchers. We established a new Early Career Researcher Committee to enable the views ECRs to be directly communicated to the Centre executive. We maintained a writing workshop to help graduate students and early career researchers with preparing manuscripts. Our students were authors on 42 journal articles this year. Our students are prize winners, including Annette Hirsch, Marissa Perry, Tess Parker, Pilar Barria, Penelope Maher and Stephanie Jacobs.
SUMMARY OF REPORT 2014 ARC CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE FOR CLIMATE SYSTEM SCIENCE
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Capacity Building & Impact: Technology
Communications and Media
NCI maintained our allocation at ~10 million hours, an increase from their eight-million hour commitment.
We maintain a strong commitment to communicating Centre activities via the media, and public talks. We gave 84 public talks, including presentations to schools and community groups. We participated in CSIRO’s Science in Schools program.
NCI played a key role in a successful LIEF application, including providing the managing Chief Investigator. This will provide enabling capability focused on data. We contribute to the creation and maintenance of many data sets hosted at NCI, including CMIP-5, the Year of Tropical Convection (YOTC), ERA-Interim, the Operational Sea Surface Temperatures and Ice (OSTIA-SST), and International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project Top of Atmosphere (ISCCP TOA) data. We help the Community Atmosphere Biosphere Land Exchange (CABLE) users establish and maintain evaluation data collection as part of the Research Data Storage Infrastructure (RDSI) storage at NCI. We partnered with Breakaway Labs to re-engineer the software that couples the ¼° and 1/10th degree ocean model and ACCESS. A very high-resolution version of Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) is maintained at NCI for use by Centre researchers. The CMS team has supported multiple models on Raijin, the NCI supercomputer enabling research across the centre to accellerate. We coupled CABLE 2.0 into the NASA Land Information System to enable new and exciting science. Additional YouTube videos have been published by the CMS team covering key technical issues. The CMS team conducted training programs during 2013 including Software Carpentry, Python, MPI, Fortran and an introduction to the NCI facility. We ran courses in the use of WRF, Land Information System (LIS) and CABLE models.
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Media story placement has dramatically increased, from 286 stories placed in 2013 up to 576 in 2014. We have worked closely with the Australian Science Media Centre, providing them rapid access to expert climate scientists as required. We continue to engage strongly with The Conversation. In 2014 we had 29 stories placed – an increase from 6 in 2012 and 26 in 2013. Our science was featured on the front page of the New York Times and in a special editorial in the Washington Post. There was also strong worldwide reporting in many other publications. Alvin Stone, our Media and Communications Manager, was a guest panellist at the Australian Science Communicators Conference, and closing plenary speaker at the Environmental Institute of Australia and New Zealand Conference. Our website traffic grew to 38,000 unique hits and 90,000 page views. Both represent a doubling since 2012. We maintain a Facebook page with 440 ‘likes’ and our Twitter account now has 1012 followers, up from 599 in 2013. We supported early career researchers to develop their communications and media profiles. Erik van Sebille, Sophie Lewis and Sarah Perkins delivered more than 80 stories through 2014. Erik became a lead spokesperson around plastic pollution in our oceans, the disappearance of MH370 and a story about a castaway. Sophie and Sarah provided widespread commentary on how climate change and increasing heatwaves were changing extreme weather events in Australia.
ARC CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE FOR CLIMATE SYSTEM SCIENCE SUMMARY OF REPORT 2014
We launched a new website focused on extremes. Led by Sarah Perkins, the Scorcher website builds on an Extremes workshop she led. The Citizen Science weather@home project, focussing on Australian and New Zealand regional modelling, was also launched and is on-going.