Abstract
Abstract. The Bureau of Meteorology Atmospheric high-resolution Regional Reanalysis for Australia (BARRA) is the first atmospheric regional reanalysis over a large region covering Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia. The production of the reanalysis with approximately 12 km horizontal resolution – BARRA-R – is well underway with completion expected in 2019. This paper describes the numerical weather forecast model, the data assimilation methods, the forcing and observational data used to produce BARRA-R, and analyses results from the 2003–2016 reanalysis. BARRA-R provides a realistic depiction of the meteorology at and near the surface over land as diagnosed by temperature, wind speed, surface pressure, and precipitation. Comparing against the global reanalyses ERA-Interim and MERRA-2, BARRA-R scores lower root mean square errors when evaluated against (point-scale) 2 m temperature, 10 m wind speed, and surface pressure observations. It also shows reduced biases in daily 2 m temperature maximum and minimum at 5 km resolution and a higher frequency of very heavy precipitation days at 5 and 25 km resolution when compared to gridded satellite and gauge analyses. Some issues with BARRA-R are also identified: biases in 10 m wind, lower precipitation than observed over the tropical oceans, and higher precipitation over regions with higher elevations in south Asia and New Zealand. Some of these issues could be improved through dynamical downscaling of BARRA-R fields using convective-scale (<2 km) models.
Highlights
Reanalyses are widely used for climate monitoring and studying climate change as they provide long-term spatially complete records of the atmosphere
The available global reanalyses established for the satellite era include the NCEP–NCAR reanalysis at 210 km horizontal resolution (Kalnay et al, 1996), the Japanese 55-year Reanalysis (JRA-55) at 60 km (Ebita et al, 2011), the Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications-2 (MERRA-2) at about 50 km (Gelaro et al, 2017), and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) ReAnalysis Interim (ERA-Interim) at ∼ 79 km (Dee et al, 2011)
The recent development of global and regional reanalyses addresses the need for high-quality, increasingly higherresolution, and longer-term reanalyses, accompanied by estimates of uncertainty, within the research and broader user communities
Summary
Reanalyses are widely used for climate monitoring and studying climate change as they provide long-term spatially complete records of the atmosphere. BARRA is the first atmospheric regional reanalysis that covers Australia, New Zealand, Southeast Asia, and south to the Antarctic ice edge (Fig. 1) It is produced by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (Bureau), with sponsorship from state fire and governmental agencies across Australia, because of the important advantages it provides for planning and management to reduce risks due to extreme weather events, including bushfires. The BARRA project delivers a whole-domain reanalysis (identified as BARRA-R) with approximately 12 km horizontal resolution and additional convective-scale (1.5 km horizontal grid-length) downscaling (BARRA-x), nested within BARRA-R, centred on major Australian cities to generate additional high-resolution information needed for local-scale applications and studies These resulting gridded (12 and 1.5 km) products include a variety of 10 min to hourly surface parameters describing weather and land-surface conditions and hourly upper-air parameters covering the troposphere and stratosphere. (2003–2016), with a focus on analysing the quality at or near the surface; Sect. 4 concludes with a brief summary of our findings
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