November 7, 2024
Climate, weather and Earth system models play a crucial role in understanding and predicting the Earth’s climate system. The annual ACCESS Community Workshop aims to provide a platform for knowledge sharing and interdisciplinary collaboration around the science that uses the ACCESS models to address the complex Earth system challenges that Australia faces.
The 2024 ACCESS Community Workshop was held over 3-5 September 2023 online and in person at the Shine Dome, Australian Academy of Science, Canberra on Ngunnawal and Ngambri country.
The workshop aims were to:
- Showcase innovative science and modelling approaches
- Learn about new components developed for ACCESS
- Share knowledge between Community Working Groups and foster new and existing community-wide collaborations
The week kicked off with ACCESS User Training day (2 September). A report about the outcomes of this event will be published soon.
We had 152 registrations for the workshop (116 in person, 36 virtual) from Australian universities, National scientific organisations, Government representatives, International universities and scientific institutions.
The workshop included 19 science and technical talks, 15 lightning presentations and 39 posters from the ACCESS community, as well as 5 invited keynote speakers. The full workshop program including recordings of all the plenary talks and links to the ACCESS-Hive Forum discussions can be found in the link below:
Program and links to the recorded sessions
Day 1 of the workshop opened with a welcome to country by Ngunnawal elder, Richie Allan, followed by an Introductions and ACCESS Science Update by ACCESS-NRI Director, Andy Hogg.
Our first keynote speaker was Tomoki Miyakawa (Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute, AORI, University of Tokyo) on “The current status of global high-resolution modelling activities” followed by a session of invited science and Community or infrastructure talks and a Lightning talks session.
The day also included a keynote presentation by Felicity McCormack (Monash University and ARC Special Research Initiative Securing Antarctica’s Environmental Future) on “An introduction to ACCESS’ ice sheet model: the Ice-sheet and Sea Level System Model (ISSM)”.
The day closed with a keynote talk by Birgit Hassler (German Aerospace Centre DLR) closed Day 1 with her keynote presentation on “ESMValTool: Analyzing CMIP-style data made easy”.
Day 2 was opened by Richard Jones (Met Office, UK) on “K-Scale: A global to regional model hierarchy for assessing the costs and benefits of high-resolution global simulations.”
Breakout sessions were the focus for Day 2 and included 8 discussion topics. These topics were proposed by the ACCESS community and selected to bring together people with shared interests across the diverse community. The discussion included sharing the status of current work, capturing future ACCESS community needs and identifying areas in need of support. Detailed summaries of the individual breakout discussion groups can be found in the Full report (Appendix 2).
Evaluation of ENSO and climate metrics in ACCESS for CMIP7 and beyond. Co-chairs: Christine Chung, (Bureau of Meteorology) and Harun Rashid (CSIRO)- Goings on at the Antarctic margins: ocean circulation, ice shelves, and sea ice. Chair: Ed Doddridge (UTAS)
- Urban representation (dataset and parameterization) in ACCESS-NRI land models. Co-chairs: Negin Nazarian, Matthew Lipson and Jiachen Lu (UNSW)
- High resolution modelling. Co-chairs: Clothilde Langlais and Chris Chapman (CSIRO)
- Regional climate modelling and ancillary generation for the nesting suite in the UM. Chair: Emma Howard (Bureau of Meteorology.
- Emulation of climate model output using machine learning or other data driven approaches.
Chair: Vassili Kitsios (CSIRO) - Paleoclimate and idealised modelling in the ACCESS suite of models.
Chair: David Hutchinson (UNSW) - Visualising Earth systems data. Co-chairs: Paige Martin and Owen Kaluza (ACCESS-NRI)
Day 2 closed with a keynote talk by Sebastian Steinig (University of Bristol, UK) on “climatearchive.org”: 500 million years of climate data at your fingertips”
Day 3 of the Workshop started with an introduction to the Community Working Group (CWG) meetings and a reflection of the first two days by ACCESS-NRI Associate Director, Kelsey Druken. This was followed by the presentation of the best poster awards, which attendees voted on through the online poster gallery. They winners included:
- Best Student Poster (and Best overall): Jemma Jeffree (ANU) for “Connecting daily weather to monthly SST”
- 1st place: Ben Schroeter (ACCESS-NRI) for “Connecting evaluation tools across the LSM community: ME.org Client + HPCPy”
- 2nd place: Farhan Rizwi et al (CSIRO) for “COMPAS A coastal unstructured ocean model using Voronoi meshes”
- 3rd place: Jasmeen Kaur (ACCESS-NRI) for “What is the ACCESS-Hive?”
Community Working Group meetings
This year, we had four Community Working group meetings on the 3rd day of the Workshop, including Atmosphere WG, Cryosphere WG, Earth Sytem Modelling WG and the new Working Group Machine learning for climate and weather that has now replaced the Forecasting and Prediction Working Group.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to our partners, ACCESS-NRI team and members of the ACCESS community for their contributions throughout the workshop and related events. We also thank the Program Committee members Andy Hogg (Chair, ACCESS-NRI), David Hutchinson (UNSW), Emma Howard (Bureau of Meteorology), Jasmeen Kaur (ACCESS-NRI), Julie Arblaster (Monash University), Tammas Loughran (CSIRO) and Natalia Bateman (ACCESS-NRI) for their valuable contributions, time and help making this a successful workshop. Finally, thanks to Harshula Jayasuriya for the photography during the workshop.
Download the full report, including outcomes from breakout sessions