AUS2200 Unified Model atmospheric simulation of the 1980 Ash Wednesday bushfire, over Australia at 2.2km resolution.

Brief description

This record was harvested by RDA at 2025-04-18T16:34:30.411+10:00 from NCI's Data Catalogue where it was last modified at 2023-06-05.

Full description

AUS2200 simulation using the Unified Model (UM) to simulate the 1980 Ash Wednesday bushfires in South Australia. This simulation is part of a set of experiments aimed at understanding the atmospheric conditions that contributed to extreme dryness and severe wildfires in southeastern Australia during significant events, including the Black Summer of 2019/2020, Black Saturday 2009, the Canberra fires of 2003, and Ash Wednesday 1983. Using AUS2200 simulations, Ayat et al. (2024) examined high spatio-temporal resolution atmospheric variables (e.g., temperature, humidity, and wind dynamics) over key wildfire-affected regions. This enabled the simulation of mesoscale processes, such as downward mixing and convective rolls, alongside large-scale processes that transported dry air from upper levels to these regions. These insights are crucial for understanding fire weather dynamics. The simulation period is 18-21 February 1980. This simulation is run using the UM v12.2, forcing are the ECMWF ERA5 and ERA5-Land reanalysis fields. The output was post-processed using the ACCESS-MOPPeR tool (doi: 10.5281/zenodo.10346217) following wherever possible the CMIP6 conventions. References Hooman Ayat, Todd Lane, Scott Wales, Michael Reeder and Yi Huang (2024). Rapid surface drying during the Black Summer bushfires in Australia: insights from high-resolution simulations. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmosphere. In revision.

Credit

This data is supported by the Australian Government’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS), with access to resources provided through the ACCESS-NRI Merit Allocation Scheme and the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI)

Lineage

This dataset is an output of the research program - CLEX Weather and Climate Interactions