July 28, 2025
The 31st annual AMOS Conference took place in Cairns last June 2025. For those coming from the south of the country, the warm weather was a welcoming start to an exciting week full of science, networking and new collaborations.
It was also an emotional five-day journey, as many talks from Australia’s leading climate experts and government representatives, stressed the alarming situation of our climate and the urgent need for action.
We would like to give a shout-out to the AMOS organisers and the local AV team for doing the behind-the-scenes work to make our workshops run smoothly.
This event was an unique opportunity to meet with the climate and weather research community and we are looking forward to participate on next year’s AMOS!
ACCESS-NRI Participation
ACCESS-NRI was represented by Andy Hogg, Heidi Nettlebeck, Chermelle Engel, Charles Turner, Edward Yang, Paige Martin, Lachlan Whyborn, Jasmeen Kaur and Natalia Bateman.
Lachlan Whyborn, from our Land Surface model team, gave a talk on recent developments in the CABLE Surface model including improvements to the water balance and groundwater, as well as other developments on the model workflow.
Dr Chermelle Engel from our Atmosphere Modelling team, delivered a fascinating talk on the technical hurdles of high-resolution ACCESS regional nesting suite for research purposes on the Gadi supercomputer.
Research software engineer Felicity Chun from the Model Evaluation and Diagnostics (MED) team on ACCESS-ENSO Recipes and ACCESS-Vis. These tools aim to provide a seamless workflow from model evaluation to impactful data visualisations to improve climate model accuracy.
As in previous AMOS Conferences, several talks showcased the research made possible by the ACCESS models, configurations, data and tools. These included Andrew Kiss from COSIMA, who gave an insightful talk on the many new capabilities of the ocean model ACCESS-OM3, Harun Rashid on exploring ENSO and Yanxuan Du, Tilo Ziehn and Andrew King on different uses of the ACCESS ESM1.5 model, just to mention some.
ACCESS-NRI Training Workshops
While ACCESS-NRI has had a presence at AMOS in previous years, this year was our first time offering training workshops as part of the conference. We hosted two breakfast workshops (“breakfast” as in we provided breakfast during the workshop, not that we were training attendees in how to make breakfast) on Tuesday and Wednesday of the conference.
The first one was full at over 30 registrants, while the second had a few no-shows so there were about 21 participants. We got some good feedback after the sessions, which indicates that we should continue offering training workshops at future AMOS conferences, but also gave us some good suggestions for how to improve our training sessions in the future.
The Tuesday workshop, titled “An overview of climate modeling, focused on Australia’s climate models”, was geared toward scientists at any career level who were completely new to climate modeling. This workshop was mostly lecture-based, with one poll partway through. The first portion was an introduction to climate models in general (e.g. what are climate models?, why do we use climate models?, processes simulated in models, model grids, parameterizations, etc.). The second portion of the workshop covered the ACCESS models. After a lovely introduction to ACCESS from my Training Team member, Jasmeen, we had other ACCESS-NRI staff members present overviews of the ACCESS model components and configurations, as well as a brief summary of model evaluation and some of the work our Software Transformation Team is doing.
The Wednesday workshop, titled “Working With Australia’s Climate Model Output Data: First Steps for Researchers”, was geared toward those who have an understanding of what climate models are, but wanted to learn how to get started with climate model output. This workshop was more hands-on, where we walked participants through how to find data at NCI (thanks to our colleagues at NCI for sharing some slides with us!) and then how to start an ARE session. We then had participants load a single variable from ACCESS-CM2 using Xarray and create a quick plot. We also shared information on how model output is structured, formatted, and a bit about how metadata works, as well as a brief overview of the Climate Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP). We had a few technical issues pop up (thanks to the ACCESS-NRI staff on hand to help with those!), but overall the hands-on portion went relatively smoothly, and most of the participants were able to follow all the way to making the plot.
Link to slides (via Zenodo) for both workshops
Images credit: Natalia Bateman, ACCESS-NRI