There were no formal presentations at the February data assimilation meeting. We were visited by Dr. Jeff Kepert from The Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research (CAWCR pronounced Cawker) which is a partnership between CSIRO and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. Jeff is a long time collaborator of HRD and is now the Team Lead for the High Impact Weather Team under the Weather and Environmental Prediction Section in CAWCR. Jeff shared the latest developments at CAWCR to develop a regional model system for Tropical Cyclone prediction called Australian Community Climate and Earth-System Simulator (ACCESS) TC. The ACCESS suite of weather models were developed and tested by the CAWCR research staff and are based on the UK Meteorological Office’s Unified Model. ACCESS-TC has shown a significant improvement in accuracy over the Bureau’s old TC model (TCLAPS), and is routinely generating a range of new weather charts and gridded data products. Jeff described the 4DVAR data assimilation approach they utilize for ACCESS-TC and the data sources they utilize. He also told us about the model performance over the past few months of the TC season in Australia including Severe Tropical Cyclone Yasi. We also discussed how the CAWCR High Impact Weather Team could collaborate with HFIP efforts to improve TC forecasts, particularly in data assimilation for Doppler radar and satellite observations. We also discussed the possibility of running ACCESS-TC on Atlantic storms.
