The Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in Australia is putting its shiny new Setonix supercomputer (ranked fourth on the most recent Top500 list) to work on an important climate change research project. The project, led by Jatin Kala (senior lecturer in Atmospheric Science at Murdoch University), will develop state-of-the-art projections for Western Australia’s climate that stretch 75 years into the future.

The project will aim to develop detailed regional climate models of Western Australia. “Global climate models are very good at simulating the very large-scale weather patterns across the entire globe, but they are not well suited for examining the impacts of climate change at local scales or for events like storms which occur on scales much smaller than the 150-280km resolution of global models,” Kala explained. “Regional climate models can help us understand how our climate may change and impact a specific region or community.”

Powered by 40 million core hours on Setonix – which Pawsey says is one of the largest allocations to a single project – and 1.54PB of storage space, Kala’s team will produce regional climate projections for Western Australia at a resolution of 4km, focusing initially on the southwestern area of the state. That 4km resolution compares extraordinarily well to the resolutions of global climate models, and even compares well to other 20km-resolution national-level projections being produced by the Australian government.

“If you had to pay private supercomputer providers for this data storage, it would be millions of dollars,” Kala said. “Pawsey is providing this in-kind under the partnership. Even though we’ve been doing this sort of work for years, it has never been at this scale. We will run simulations from 1950 to 2100 at 4km resolution. This includes two future climate scenarios with two different model configurations; this has never been done before.”

The researchers expect the first projections from the project to be available to the climate science community by 2024, after which point they will be leveraged to help business and government prepare for the ongoing impacts of climate change.

“Modeling like this goes beyond just understanding weather patterns,” Kala said. “For example, this information will allow winemakers in Margaret River to see what the next 50 to 100 years might look like for their industry in terms of a changing climate.”

The project is a partnership between Pawsey, the Australian Department of Water and Environmental Regulation, Murdoch University and the New South Wales Government, falling under the Climate Science Initiative (CSI).

“We are really proud to support this strategic partnership, as we can see the huge impact these climate change projections will have on our state,” said Mark Stickells, Pawsey’s executive director. “Dr Kala and his team have been working with Pawsey in this space for many years, and to see the research progressing to such an impressive scale is a testament to what our experts are capable of when they have access to the tools they need.”

To learn more about this project, read the reporting from Pawsey’s Karina Nunez here or visit the project page here.