Project number: 2024-107
Project Status:
Current
Budget expenditure: $313,540.00
Principal Investigator: James C. Taylor
Organisation: Bureau of Meteorology (BoM)
Project start/end date: 19 Jun 2025 - 15 Jun 2028
Contact:
FRDC
TAGS
Climate Change

Need

This project encompasses a 'research to operations' transition for two prototype long-range forecast products and their subsequent operational maintenance for a period of at least 5 years.

Project funds will contribute to the substantial backend technical requirements to transition the prototype long-range forecast products into the supported operations of the Bureau of Meteorology.

This transition will involve changes to supercomputing software, data delivery mechanisms, visualisation software, webpage displays and associated business processes.

Separate arrangements have been made to ensure that the research prototype forecast products are available for the summer of 2025/26 to ensure continuity and facilitate the operational transition.

The new long-range marine heatwave outlooks will be freely and publicly available. They will be updated with the same reliability and frequency as the Bureau's ocean temperature ACCESS-S system outputs – with a current cadence of 2-3 times weekly. The forecast displays will be accompanied by support material specifically designed to facilitate the appropriate interpretation of the outlooks by Australian organisations involved in fisheries, marine environment management and related fields.

Objectives

. Development of explanatory text and images to facilitate community interpretation of the marine heatwave outlooks
specifically for a general Australian fisheries and marine management audience. This material will address system details, statistical methods and interpretation and be suitable to publish on the Bureau's webpages.Contributor attribution will be supported in this material.
. Development of map visualisation specifications that facilitate appropriate communication of the marine heatwave outlooks within the context of the Bureau's ocean services. This will cover colour schemes, map layouts and associated design factors.
. Deployment of software changes to the operational supercomputing (HPC) environment to post-process the required outputs from the ACCESS-S system.
. Deployment of internal data integration platform changes to deliver post-processed forecast data to the appropriate visualisation locations.
. Launch of the new long-range marine heatwave outlooks and associated content on the Bureau's public webpages.
. Reliable and regular updates to the long-range marine heatwave outlooks using the latest ACCESS-S2 model output for the project duration.