Climate Services (Dec 2022)
A national hydrological projections service for Australia
Abstract
Australia’s water management and infrastructure decision making needs detailed high-resolution climate and water forecasts and projections to inform the process of water-sensitive decision making, raise awareness and understand future risks, and to mitigate, adapt, and capitalise on the impacts of a changing climate in industries ranging from agriculture and water management to fire risk. Until now no nationally consistent information on hydrological change has existed preventing standardised and comparable impact assessments across multiple spatial and temporal scales, particularly for the management of hazards and risks spanning jurisdictional boundaries. Information available for Australian hydrological impact assessments to date has been produced through state and territory based regional downscaling efforts, across limited timescales and using different interpretation methods, particularly regarding downscaling and assessing hydrological impacts.To address this need, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has released an innovative, seamless national landscape water service called the Australian Water Outlook. This service provides historical data on water availability with forecast products, as well as hydrological impact projections, using the Bureau’s operational Australian Water Landscape Water Balance model (AWRA-L). The service combines state-of-the-art hydrological research with a user-centred design approach to develop the service and user interface to meet the needs of Australia water resource managers. The innovative science underpinning the hydrological projections service includes nationally consistent downscaling and bias-correction approaches using three statistical methods in an operational framework to produce a future projections dataset including climate (rainfall, solar radiation, temperature, and wind) and water (soil moisture, potential evapotranspiration, and runoff) information in a consistent format.The hydrological projections component of the service showcases novel ways of communicating the plausible impacts of climate change on Australia’s water resources through a ‘storylines’ approach. As part of the service development the Bureau of Meteorology is also working with early adopters and priority customers to demonstrate the application of the service to water management. This paper describes the inception and development of the service informed by a process of user-centred design, and provides examples of storyline approaches for water resources management.
