CMIP6 High Resolution Projections Data
The Queensland Government has produced high-resolution climate change projections for Australasia using dynamical downscaling of global climate models (GCMs) from the latest phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6).
Please note: the projections data available via the Queensland Future Climate Dashboard, Regional Explorer and other online information products are based on CMIP5 models at this time. We expect to update the full suite of Queensland Future Climate resources based on CMIP6 projections data at some time in the second half of 2024.
Eleven CMIP6 GCMs were selected to produce the downscaled climate change simulations with three models run in multiple configurations, leading to an ensemble of 15 regional climate models. The work includes a 10km resolution dataset of mean climate and climate hazard indices for the whole of Australia, and an hourly 20km resolution dataset for all of Australasia that is compliant with the COordinated Regional climate Downscaling EXperiment (CORDEX) requirements. The 10km resolution projections for Queensland will be made available for viewing via the Queensland Future Climate Dashboard, with a planned release for the second half of 2024.
The Conformal Cubic Atmospheric Model (CCAM) was used to dynamically downscale the CMIP6 GCMs at a 10 km resolution for the 1960 – 2100 period for three Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP1-2.6, SSP2-4.5 and SSP3-7.0). Some CCAM simulations were run in atmosphere-only mode and others in ocean-coupled form. For atmosphere only runs, sea surface temperature and sea ice were bias corrected prior to running CCAM. The 10km projections were regridded for a 20km domain to produce the hourly CORDEX compliant downscaled simulations.
The CORDEX-CMIP6 downscaled regional projections for all of Australia are now available as gridded datasets (netCDF). A paper evaluating these new datasets is also available.
The downscaled models are listed below (note that models denoted with _oc represent coupled ocean models):
| CMIP6 model name: | Model name: | Institution name(s): | Country of origin: |
|---|---|---|---|
| ACCESS-ESM1.5 | Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator, version 1.5, CCAM atmospheric model version | CSIRO & BoM | Australia |
| ACCESS-ESM1.5_oc (run for two variants) | Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator, version 1.5, CCAM coupled ocean model version | CSIRO & BoM | Australia |
| ACCESS_CM2_oc | Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator, version 2, CCAM coupled ocean version | CSIRO & BoM | Australia |
| CMCC-ESM2 | Centro Euro-Mediterraneo sui Cambiamenti Climatici Earth System Model, version 2 | Centro Euro-Mediterraneo sui Cambiamenti Climatici | Italy |
| CNRM-CM6-1-HR | Centre National de Recherches Météorologiques Coupled Global Climate Model, version 6.1, high-resolution | CNRM & CERFACS | France |
| CNRM-CM6-1-HR_oc | Centre National de Recherches Météorologiques Coupled Global Climate Model, version 6.1, high-resolution, CCAM coupled ocean version | CNRM & CERFACS | France |
| EC-Earth3 | European Community Earth-System Model, version 3 | European consortium of national meteorological services and research institutes | Various European countries |
| FGOALS-g3 | Flexible Global Ocean-Atmosphere-Land System Model, grid point version 3 | Chinese Academy of Sciences | China |
| GFDL-ESM2M | Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory Earth System Model, version 4 | GFDL NOAA | USA |
| MGISS-E2-2-G | Goddard Institute for Space Studies Model E2.2Gn | GISS NASA | USA |
| MPI-ESM1-2-LR | Max Planck Institute Earth System Model, version 1.2, low resolution | Max Planck Institute | Germany |
| MRI-ESM2-0 | Meteorological Research Institute Earth System Model, version 2.0 | Meteorological Research Institute | Japan |
| NorESM1-MM | Norwegian Earth System Model, version 2, 1 degree resolution | Norwegian Climate Centre | Norway |
| NorESM2-MM_oc | Norwegian Earth System Model, version 2, 1 degree resolution, CCAM coupled ocean version | Norwegian Climate Centre | Norway |
Note that CNRM-CM6-1-HR and NorESM2-MM were run in both atmosphere-only and coupled atmosphere-ocean versions, while three variants of the ACCESS-ESM1.5 model were downscaled (r20i1p1f1 and r40i1p1f1 in ocean-coupled form, and r6i1p1f1 in atmosphere-only form).
The new CMIP6 projections dataset will be referred to as QldFCP-2 (with the original CMIP5 projections being QldFCP-1).
