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 to drive catastrophe models for quantifying the financial impacts of natural hazards. One such catastrophe model is the Unified Natural Hazard Risk Mitigation Exploratory Decision Support System (UNHaRMED) developed by the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC. UNHaRMED explores how natural hazard risk changes, driven by climatic, economic, demographic and policy factors using an integrated modelling approach.

This presentation will illustrate the potential uses of BARRA to meet the important data needs for catastrophe modelling in the Australian region. This will be supported by example risk assessment studies that have integrated BARRA data into UNHaRMED.

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.