Kevin Hennessy, Leanne Webb and John Clarke

CSIRO Ocean and Atmosphere Flagship

CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology have developed a comprehensive set of climate projections and supporting materials for Australia. Projections are provided for a range of climate variables including temperature, rainfall, humidity, evapotranspiration, solar radiation, wind-speed, drought, fire-weather, sea level and ocean temperature, salinity and acidification.

The projections and supporting materials are made available through a suite of reports, brochures, animations and datasets, all of which are available at www.climatechangeinaustralia.gov.au. Close engagement with the natural resource management and research sectors aimed to make these products fit for purpose. Users of the data also have access to guidance material, training, case studies and a Help Desk .

Projections data provided fall into two categories:

• Projected climate changes (relative to the IPCC reference period 1986-2005), based on results from 40 CMIP5 global climate models judged to perform well over Australia.
• Application-ready future climate data (where projected changes are applied to observed data for use in risk assessments) based on a subset of eight CMIP5 models. This subset represents most of the range of possible changes in temperature, rainfall and wind-speed over most of Australia. 

Support for risk assessment is also provided through use of the Australian Climate Futuresweb-tool where future ‘best case', ‘worst case' and ‘maximum consensus' scenarios can be identified for any given region, time period and emissions scenario. This is the most comprehensive and user-driven suite of climate projections information ever produced for Australia.