9s climatology for continental Australia 2036-2065: CAN ESM 2 rcp 4.5 : Summary variables with elevation and radiative adjustment

Brief description

A suite of 9s resolution climate surfaces for the Australian continent, with adjustment for the radiative effects of terrain. This collection represents a 30 year average centred on 2050 for the CAN ESM2 circulation model under RCP 4.5. Projected future climates were generated by applying within-model changes (e.g. CAN ESM2 2036-2065 –CAN ESM2 (1976-2005) calculated at the native general circulation model grid resolution to these current surfaces, using ANUCLIM 6.1 prior to radiative adjustment. Precipitation, temperature, evaporation and water balance data are presented as annual means or totals and maximum and minimum monthly values.

Data are provided as zipped ESRI float grids: Binary float grids (*.flt) with associated ESRI header files (*.hdr) and projection files (*.prj). After extracting from the zip archive, these files can be imported into most GIS software packages, and can be used as other binary file formats by substituting the appropriate header file.

Additionally a short methods summary is provided in the file 9sClimateMethodsSummary.pdf for further information, including a nomenclature for files.

Lineage

Climate surfaces for the present were based on the ANUCLIM 6.1 (Xu and Hutchinson, 2011) 30 year average climate surfaces for Australia (1976-2005), with elevational lapse rate correction applied over the 9s GEODATA digital elevation model (Hutchinson et al , 2008). Radiative correction derived from the same DEM was applied to radiation and maximum temperature before calculation of evaporation, using the CSIRO TerraFormer software. Summary statistics for each variable were then calculated including variables described in Williams et al (2012). A short methods summary is provided in the file 9sClimateMethodsSummary.pdf for further information.