What is NARCliM?

The New South Wales and Australian Regional Climate Modelling (NARCliM) project develops high-resolution regional climate projections that cover NSW and South-eastern Australia at a higher resolution and the Australasian continent and beyond at another resolution (named the NARCliM and CORDEX domains, respectively). Computer modelled climate projections are the best information we have available on our future climate. NARCliM has been designed to help government, industry and community in NSW and Australia plan for our future with robust regional and local scale data. The NARCliM project uses currently available global climate models (GCM) and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions scenarios from the latest Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) used in the IPCC reports and applies regional dynamical downscaling using the latest Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF). NARCliM generates critical climate indices for a broad range of applications and climate change adaptation and risk analysis.

NARCliM1.0

The NARCliM project began as a multi-agency partnership led by the NSW Government, partnered with the ACT Government, and with contributions from the Climate Change Research Centre (CCRC) at the University of New South Wales. NARCliM1.0 was released in 2014. It contains simulations from four CMIP3 GCMs and three regional climate models (RCM) using WRF3.3 for one future GHG scenario (SRES A2). Time periods included are 1990 to 2009, 2020 to 2039 and 2060 to 2079, with a grid resolution of 10km for South-eastern Australia (NARCliM domain) nested within a 50km grid for Australasia (CORDEX domain). NARCliM1.0 data has been used for a range of NSW climate adaptation and impact studies and climate change visualisations.

NARCliM1.0 features: * Historical period: 1990 to 2009 * Future simulation periods: 2020 to 2039 and 2060 to 2079

Some common variables projected by NARCliM1.0 include: * Temperature * Precipitation * Wind speed * Surface evaporation * Soil moisture * Bias corrected and post processed data * Three National Centres for Environmental Predictions (NCEP) reanalysis forced simulations were run from 1950 to 2009.

Model output

For access to NARCliM climate projections data, please visit the NSW Climate Data Portal or the National Computational Infrastructure at ANU. The Climate Data Portal provides users access to NARCliM's most commonly used "core variables" at daily and monthly frequencies. Additional variables useful for specialist analysis are available upon request. For more information, visit the AdaptNSW website, or contact us through the NARCliM Mailbox, narclim@environment.nsw.gov.au.

Related links

Discover how climate change will affect your region at AdaptNSW