NARCliM1.5 climate projections

What is NARCliM?

The New South Wales and Australian Regional Climate Modelling (NARCliM) project develops high-resolution regional climate projections that cover NSW and South-eastern Australia at a higher resolution and the Australasian continent and beyond at another resolution (named the NARCliM and CORDEX domains, respectively). Computer modelled climate projections are the best information we have available on our future climate. NARCliM has been designed to help government, industry and community in NSW and Australia plan for our future with robust regional and local scale data. The NARCliM project uses currently available global climate models (GCM) and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions scenarios from the latest Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) used in the IPCC reports and applies regional dynamical downscaling using the latest Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF). NARCliM generates critical climate indices for a broad range of applications and climate change adaptation and risk analysis.

NARCliM1.5

An enhanced set of climate projections (NARCliM1.5) were released in 2020. NARCliM1.5 contains simulations from three CMIP5 GCMs and two RCMs and two GHG scenarios (RCP4.5 and RCP8.5). The simulated time period is continuous from 1951 to 2100. NARCliM1.5 has the same grid resolution as NARCliM1.0 – a 10 km grid for South-eastern Australia (NARCliM domain) nested within a 50 km grid for Australasia (CORDEX domain), and is useful for analysis of climate extremes, impact thresholds and stress testing.

The new projections offer enhancements to NARCliM1.0 (2014). These include: * Global climate models (GCMs) from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project-5 (CMIP5) * Two future climate scenarios called Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) from CMIP5: RCP4.5 (some mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions); and RCP8.5 (very limited mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions) * A continuous time period of 1951 to 2100 * Daily, monthly and seasonal timesteps * Post-processed data of fifteen core variables and bias-corrected data for three variables and data. * Additionally, users can access two two ERA-Interim reanalysis forced simulations were run for 1979 to 2013.

NARCliM1.5 has been designed as a supplement to NARCliM1.0 in order to provide broader range of future climate variability. Users are required to review and agree to the Terms and Conditions of use. Further, users are strongly advised that NARCliM1.5 is not a replacement for NARCliM1.0, rather, NARCliM1.5 complements NARCliM1.0. Therefore, both sets of models should be used to capture the range of future climate variability for South-eastern Australia. Additional information about the data is available on the AdaptNSW website

Model output

For access to NARCliM1.5 climate projections data, please visit the NSW Climate Data Portal or the National Computational Infrastructure at ANU.
Additional variables useful for specialist analysis are available upon request. For more information, visit the AdaptNSW website, or contact us through the NARCliM Mailbox, narclim@environment.nsw.gov.au.