The Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science
Published on the 17 Jul 2011
The Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science is a major initiative funded by the Australian Research Council. The Centre is an international research consortium of five Australian universities and a suite of outstanding national and international Partner Organizations. It will build on and improve existing understanding of the modeling of regional climates to enable enhanced adaptation to and management of climate change, particularly in the Australian region.
The Centre was established in 2011 with extensive investment from the Australian Research Council, the University of New South Wales, the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency, New South Wales Government, Monash University, the Australian National University, the University of Melbourne, and the University of Tasmania. It has strong links with the Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator (ACCESS) initiative and works in partnership with the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) Facility.
The Centre’s focus, Climate System Science, is the quantitative study of the climate system designed to enable modeling of the future of the climate system. It is built on a core of the sciences of the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and land surface. It includes the physics, dynamics and biology of these systems, and the flow of energy, water and chemicals between them. Climate System Science builds mathematical models of these systems based on observations. It describes these observations, and the underlying physics of the system, in computer codes. These computer codes are known as a “climate model” and utilize very large super computers.
The scale of research enabled by the Centre will provide for the enhancement of climate modeling and future climate projections particularly at regional scales, minimizing Australia’s economic, social and environmental vulnerability to climate change.
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