July 28, 2025
Photo of Dr Mathew Lipson
In this article we find out more about Dr Mathew Lipson, a Senior Research Fellow at UNSW in the ARC Centre of Excellence for 21st Century Weather.
Where did you grow up and how did you come to be a climate researcher?
I grew up in Sydney, but I came late to being a climate researcher, having first studied and worked as an architect. I later changed to study physics, then complete an honours and PhD with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Systems Science.
Which ACCESS models/configurations you use and what do you use them for?
I often use the regional atmosphere/land model: ACCESS-rAM. It gives me a lot of flexibility to run different regions and different resolutions. I’ve used ACCESS-rAM as high as 300 m resolution, but more typically I’m running at around 2–4 km for longer periods and over larger domains.
I mostly use ACCESS-rAM to understand how changes to the land surface affect weather locally and regionally. For example, I’ve used ACCESS-rAM to look at impacts of urban areas, bushfire scars and large-scale land clearing in the north of Australia.
What is the focus of your research and what excites you about your work?
My research focuses on land–atmosphere interactions, with a particular emphasis on cities. To better represent cities in climate models, I’ve worked on integrating more realistic urban land cover data into ACCESS when using JULES (the UK land surface model). I’m also assisting Jiachen Lu, who is incorporating an urban scheme into CABLE (Australia’s land surface model).
What excites me is making models more accurate for the places we live (e.g. cities or land surfaces in general), and understanding human impacts on the local environment. This is why I’ve been focussed on high resolutions, urban areas, agriculture, water resources, etc.
What do you like to do outside work?
Canberra is great for riding and bushwalking. I also like squash, boardgames and side projects like isithotrightnow.com.
Snapshot of the Isithotrightnow website for Canberra, as of 2025-07-28 at 1:41pm.