Preliminary assessment of regional moderate-resolution atmospheric reanalysis for Australia / Chun-Hsu Su, Susan Rennie, Joshua Torrance, Imtiaz Dharssi, Siyuan Tian, Emma Howard, Acacia Pepler, Christian Stassen, Peter Steinle

"There is a demand for reliable high-resolution meteorological data sets that provide finer spatial details of the lower atmosphere states for hydrological, ecological, biological, air-quality, and hazard modelling. Long-term climate change studies and ongoing climate assessments require long data timeseries that are continuously updated over time. Observational data records are limited in their spatiotemporal extents, and changes in the observing networks and instrumentations over time may lead to spurious signals in the derived long-term trends at the local scales. Gridded observation-only analyses can overcome some of these issues but are generally limited to few meteorological variables. Regional atmospheric reanalyses aim to meet demands for local-scale climate data, which could not be fulfilled by contemporary coarse-resolution global reanalyses (30 km to 50 km). ... The Bureau of Meteorology (Bureau) Atmospheric high-resolution Regional Reanalysis for Australia (BARRA) provides such regional reanalyses on 12-km to km-scale grids for the Australasian region. The first 29-year (1990–2018) BARRA reanalysis (referred to as BARRA1 henceforth), based on using the Bureau's numerical weather prediction models and assimilation systems, was produced in 2019. ... The Bureau is developing a new version 2 of BARRA (BARRA2) for the Australian Climate Service (ACS, www.acs.gov.au). BARRA2 can enable a consistent and detailed characterisation of historical hazards over the modern satellite era from 1979 to the present day. The resulting new climate data set, with a plan for being continuously updated, will replace BARRA1 to support many aspects of ACS, such as validation and calibration of global and regional climate projections, development of detailed climatologies of hazards and hazard indicators, historical contextualisation of present weather events, and supporting in-depth case studies of recent events."--Introduction.