The Bureau of Meteorology has completed a reanalysis project (BARRA) to generate the high detail, realistic representation of historical weather over Australia and the surrounding region (Su et al., 2019). A meteorological "reanalysis" takes all available observations and uses a weather model to infer physically realistic fine detail, both at the surface where people live and in the atmosphere. Reanalysis datasets are extremely valuable because they provide a consistent method of analysing the atmosphere over an extended period giving greater understanding of the weather and its changes over Australia, including extreme events.

The BARRA reanalysis offers a unique set of gridded meteorological data that can be used for electricity systems planning and research. This presentation will highlight a number of potential applications of BARRA data to inform the electricity sector, including:

• Understanding the temporal and spatial variability of wind and solar resources across Australia;
• Quantifying electricity generation potential from wind and solar resources;
• Identifying optimal locations for the positioning of new renewable energy generation assets;
• Investigating the persistence of concurrent lulls at priority wind power generation sites; and
• Undertaking detailed examinations of past extreme weather events over Australia that have affected the energy market.

References

Su, C.-H., Eizenberg, N., Steinle, P., Jakob, D., Fox-Hughes, P., White, C. J., Rennie, S., Franklin, C., Dharssi, I., and Zhu, H.: BARRA v1.0: the Bureau of Meteorology Atmospheric high-resolution Regional Reanalysis for Australia, Geosci. Model Dev., 12, 2049–2068, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-12-2049-2019, 2019.