The World Climate Research Programme Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) is an internationally coordinated research activity that provides climate model output from a series of carefully designed and targeted experiments. The analysis of CMIP6 data will form the basis for assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth Assessment Report (IPCC-AR6) and inform policy- and decision-makers around the world.
For Australia, CMIP6 will underpin research into historical climate variability as well as future projections research into the timing, extent and consequences of climate change and extreme weather events. This work will assist Australian governments, business, agriculture and industry to manage climate risks and opportunities related to climate variability, change and extremes.
NCI Australia is a Tier-1 data node of the international Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) that coordinates the CMIP6 data around the world. The nodes of ESGF are a major research infrastructure collaboration that includes NCI, US Department of Energy at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, NOAA, and NASA, Germany's DKRZ, France's IPSL, and CEDA in the UK.
NCI is managing a significant portion of the multi-petabyte CMIP6 data which will be used by the Australian climate research community for high performance data analysis at NCI, as well as providing easy access for users from the broader Australasian/Oceania region. NCI will make more data available to users as it is released by the international and local climate modelling centres. This includes the Australian Community Climate and Earth Systems Simulator (ACCESS) model projections which are being generated by CSIRO with support from the NESP Earth Systems and Climate Change Hub.
NCI's national leadership in petascale data management and high-performance data systems are a vital component in enabling this climate research in Australia. Our integrated data storage, supercomputing and data services provide the only platform in Australia capable of supporting the intensive data analysis and simulation that CMIP6 requires.
Providing high-quality, research-ready data directly to the climate community is a deeply collaborative effort involving the lead climate science agencies both internationally and within Australia. NCI works with both scientific and technical experts from CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology, and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes (CLEx) to make this valuable data available to the community. This work is supported with funding from the Australian Government National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) through both NCI Australia and the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC).
More information on how researchers can access the CMIP6 data through the NCI systems can be found on our CMIP Community support website.
Read more about NCI's Climate Science Data-enhanced Virtual Laboratory project here.
