BARRA-SY: Bureau of Meteorology Atmospheric high-resolution Regional Reanalysis for Australia SY Product

Creators: Bureau of Meteorology¹

1. Bureau of Meteorology

Sponsor:: NSW Rural Fire Service

Description

Downscaled (1.5km) regional atmospheric reanalysis over eastern New South Wales. The Bureau of Meteorology high-resolution Regional Reanalysis for Australia (BARRA) is a high-resolution multi-decadal regional atmospheric reanalysis. The reanalysis provides information about surface conditions (such as temperature, precipitation, wind speed and direction, humidity, evaporation and soil moisture), information on multiple pressure and model levels, and information on solar radiation and cloud cover. The reanalysis suite is based on the Australian Community Climate Earth-System Simulator (ACCESS) and extends 70 levels (up to 80 km) into the atmosphere. It is nested within the required boundary and/or initial conditions provided by ERA-Interim reanalysis, Operational SST and Sea Ice Analysis, and the Bureau offline soil moisture reanalysis. The region covered by the reanalysis is the Australian continent, and the surrounding region including parts of southeast Asia, New Zealand, and south to the ice edge of the Antarctic continent. The suite contains 5 datasets. The "regional" dataset contains about 100 parameters, available at hourly time steps at approximately 12-km resolution. The 4 "subdomain" datasets, (South-West W.A., S.A., Eastern N.S.W., and Tasmania), are dynamically downscaled analyses at 1.5-km resolution. These have been developed using multiple convective-scale (1.5-km) downscaling analyses driven by the 12-km system.

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

References

Su, C.-H., Eizenberg, N., Jakob, D., Fox-Hughes, P., Steinle, P., White, C. J., and Franklin, C.: BARRA v1.0: kilometre-scale downscaling of an Australian regional atmospheric reanalysis over four midlatitude domains, Geosci. Model Dev., 14, 4357–4378, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-14-4357-2021, 2021.