Where does the RAP climate data come from?

The climate data that drives the exposure assessment component of the RAP is derived from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology BARRA-R2 dataset, and ECMWF’s ERA5 dataset.

BARRA stands for the Bureau's Atmospheric high-resolution Regional Reanalysis for Australia (not the fish!). The dataset was generated using the Australian Community Climate Earth-System Simulator (ACCESS) computer weather model and available observations from January 1979 to a couple of months ago. The latest data will be updated periodically throughout the year.

The resolution (or space between data points) is 12 km over Australia.

This data set is made available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode

ECMWF’s ERA5 data is also used in Kite, providing a consistent historical record of weather variables back to 1940. It has a resolution of 31 km between data points, over the entire world.

Katestone/Weather Intelligence has not modified the data. Various parameters were used to calculate the HLI.

Reference

Authors: Chun-Hsu Su, Susan Rennie, Imtiaz Dharssi, Joshua Torrance, Andy Smith, Tan Le, Peter Steinle, Christian Stassen, Rob A. Warren, Carl Wang, John Le Marshall. 7Title: BARRA2: Development of the next-generation Australian regional atmospheric reanalysis ISBN: 978-1-925738-96-4 ISSN: 2206-3366