Our next talk in our Geo Colloquium series:

Luigi Renzullo, opens an external URL in a new window, Senior Research Scientist, Australian Bureau of Meteorology
The best of both worlds: towards unified hydrological modelling with value to both earth system science and water resources management
Wednesday, June 21, 2023, at 11:00 in FH HS 7 (Freihaus, 2nd floor, yellow area)

Abstract:

A revolution in water resources management in Australia began in 2007 when the Bureau of Meteorology were given the additional authority by act of law to collate, hold, manage, interpret, and disseminate water information for the whole continent. This spurred a flurry of research activity in the development of modelling and data integration methods and infrastructure to generate spatial information products with an accuracy, consistency, relevance, and timeliness necessary for the Bureau's national water resources assessments and accounting. Much of this research culminated in the operationalisation of the Australian Water Resources Assessment (AWRA) model which generates daily water balance products across Australia.  However, AWRA runs inside the Bureau independently of the weather and climate prediction earth system model (called ACCESS). Not surprisingly, therefor, there are inconsistencies among common water related variables between the two systems: ACCESS outputs lack the detail, accuracy and direct relevance for water reporting; while AWRA products are on time and space scales incompatible with weather prediction needs.
In this presentation I will describe the Bureau's plans towards unified hydrological modelling to resolve inconsistencies between AWRA and ACCESS.  Specifically, I will describe some of our activities to improve the hydrology of the land surface model within ACCESS, namely the Joint UK Land Environment Simulator (JULES), to achieve the dual goals of consistency of the land surface and atmosphere models within ACCESS, and accuracy for water resources reporting needs.  Key to success will be many of the lessons learned during the AWRA development in the integration of data, including novel earth observation products, within modelling frameworks.  I will describe selected highlights of the journey and our attempts to transferring our experiences to JULES.