Continental-scale bias-corrected climate and hydrological projections for Australia

Abstract

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has developed a national hydrological projections (NHP) service for Australia. The NHP aimed to provide nationally consistent hydrological projections across jurisdictional boundaries to support planning of water-dependent industries. NHP is complementary to those previously produced by federal and state governments, universities, and other organisations for limited geographical domains. The projections comprise an ensemble of application-ready bias-corrected climate model data, derived hydrological projections at daily temporal and 0.05° × 0.05° spatial resolution for the period 1960–2099, and two emission scenarios (Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 4.5 and RCP8.5). The spatial resolution of the projections matches that of gridded historical reference data used to perform the bias correction and the Bureau of Meteorology's operational gridded hydrological model. Three bias correction techniques were applied to four CMIP5 global climate models (GCMs), and one method was applied to a regional climate model (RCM) forced by the same four GCMs, resulting in a 16-member ensemble of bias-corrected GCM data for each emission scenario. The bias correction was applied to fields of precipitation, minimum and maximum temperature, downwelling shortwave radiation, and surface winds. These variables are required inputs to the Bureau of Meteorology's landscape water balance hydrological model (AWRA-L), which was forced using the bias-corrected GCM and RCM data to produce a 16-member ensemble of hydrological output. The hydrological output variables include root zone soil moisture (moisture in the top 1 m soil layer), potential evapotranspiration, and runoff. Here we present an overview of the production of the hydrological projections, including GCM selection, bias correction methods and their evaluation, technical aspects of their implementation, and examples of analysis performed to construct the NHP service. The data are publicly available on the National Computing Infrastructure (https://doi.org/10.25914/6130680dc5a51, Bureau of Meteorology, 2021), and a user interface is accessible at https://awo.bom.gov.au/products/projection/ (last access: 24 November 2023).