Earth and environmental science research has long been a cornerstone of NCI’s user base. Through integrated high-performance computing and data, NCI is a central hub for many of the weather, climate, earth-observation and geoscience activities of the Australian research community and national science agencies.
This branch of the NCI research space covers everything from long-term climate modelling to bushfire fuel predictions and underground resource exploration. The computational and data requirements of this discipline continue to grow, as do the scope and ambition of the work. Weather and climate models run at NCI continue to scale up their resolutions and provide better detail, more accurate physics and faster results than ever before. Similarly, researchers are now taking full advantage of the influx of satellite imagery giving us a regularly updated look at Australia from space.
Beyond the pure computational power required to model extreme weather over our capital cities, dealing with the large amounts of earth and environmental data stored and produced at NCI requires custom software, dedicated hardware and supporting expertise alongside it all. The critical work of the Bureau of Meteorology, CSIRO and Geoscience Australia requires ambitious and innovative computing services from NCI.
Our efforts in this space extend internationally through major collaborations with the American Geophysical Union, the Earth Science Grid Federation and the International Unified Model Development Partnership. NCI plays a critical role in bringing international climate and satellite data to Australia, providing a critical link between global research communities and enabling Australia’s national contribution to international climate modelling efforts.
The earth and environmental science researchers cover a huge range of domains and research methods. The breadth of research areas showcases the importance of these topics to the community. Land managers, weather forecasters, oceanographers, geologists and many more make use of the computing and data infrastructure available at NCI.
