High-Resolution Modelling of Extreme Storms over the East Coast of Australia

Creators: Di Luca, Alejandro¹; Argueso, Daniel¹; Jourdain, Nicolas²; Evans, Jason¹

1. UNSW Sydney
2. CNRS en Alpes, Grenoble, Rhône-Alpes, FR

Data manager:: Petrelli, Paola¹

Rights holder:: University of New South Wales

Sponsor:: ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes

1. University of Tasmania

Description

This dataset includes data of 11 extreme East Coast Lows simulated using a multi-physics (5), multi-resolution (3) approach for 4 different boundary conditions, leading to a total of 660 simulations. All simulations were performed using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF v3.6) regional model using a triple nesting approach with different domain sizes.

The outer domain corresponds to the CORDEX (Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment) Australasia domain and is discretized using a 24-km horizontal grid spacing.

ECMWF ERA Interim (ERAI) reanalysis are use to initialize and drive the model for present climate simulations. For future climate simulations, the Pseudo Global Warming (PGW) approach is used. In this case, initial and boundary conditions are built by adding the climate change signal obtained from a global climate multi-model ensemble from the CMIP5.

We selected a total of eleven events featuring an extreme east coast low over the eastern coast of Australia. Events were selected based on their impacts around the Sydney area and the selection includes some of the most iconic events in recent times such as the 'Pasha Bulker' (June 2007) and the June 2016 storms. All events were simulated for a total of 8 days, starting about 4 days before the storm peaked near the Sydney's area. A full list of events dates is given below.

Periods

2001-07-23 to 2001-07-31
2005-03-18 to 2005-03-26
2006-09-03 to 2006-09-11
2007-06-04 to 2007-06-12
2007-06-13 to 2007-06-21
2007-06-22 to 2007-06-30
2008-08-18 to 2008-08-26
2008-09-02 to 2008-09-10
2013-02-17 to 2013-02-25
2015-04-18 to 2015-04-26
2016-06-01 to 2016-06-09

Two sets of simulations were performed for all events using different sources of oceanic boundary conditions (OBCs). One set of simulations was performed using sea surface temperatures (SSTs) directly obtained from the ERA-Interim re-analysis (~0.75 deg). A second set of simulations was performed using the higher spatial resolution SSTs (~0.1 deg) from the Bluelink ReANalysis (BRAN) dataset. The final data product is the post-processing files of all simulations made following CORDEX standards.

Complete details of the events, physics and boundary conditions are listed in the included readme file.

Variables available after post-processing

Surface level variables at 1 hr frequency

prm - precipitation rate (mm)

2m surface variables at 1 hr frequency

tas - temperature (K)

Surface level variables at 3 hrs frequency

psl - mean sea level pressure (hPa)
sst sea surface temperature (K)

Near-surface level variables at 3 hrs frequency

cape2d - Convective Available Potential Energy - CAPE (J kg-1)
tpw - total precipitable water (mm)

2m surface variables at 3 hrs frequency

hus - specic humidity (%)
hurs relative humidity (%)

10m surface variables at 3 hrs frequency

uas - zonal wind (m s-1)
vas - meridional wind (m s-1)

Pressure level variables at 6 hrs frequency

Pressure levels are 200, 500, 700, 850 and 925 hPa.

ta - temperature (K)
ua - zonal wind (m s-1)
va - meridional wind (m s-1)
wa - vertical wind (m s-1)
zg - gepotential height (m)
hus - specic humidity (kg kg-1)

This dataset was created by Dr Alejandro Di Luca as part of the Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) funded project (DE170101191) and is part of the Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes (CLEX) Extreme Rainfall research program.

Official metadata and access to the data is via the NCI geonetwork record in related identifiers.

Access information (English)

Preferred citation:

Di Luca, Alejandro, Argueso, D., Jourdain, N., Evans, J., 2021. High-Resolution Modelling of Extreme Storms over the East Coast of Australia v1.0 (2021). NCI Australia. (Dataset). https://dx.doi.org/10.25914/604eb7628b4e7

NCI THREDDS Data Server: