2022 ACCESS Community Workshop Report

The 2022 ACCESS Community Workshop was held in Canberra over 22-23 June 2022 as a hybrid event. There were 170 registrations for the workshop (107 virtual, 63 in person), including participants from the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM), CSIRO, the Australian Antarctic Division, University of Tasmania, University of Melbourne, Australian National University, Monash University, Murdoch University, University of Sydney and University of New South Wales. The workshop aims and program can be found here.
 

The workshop included 12 invited science talks from the ACCESS community as well as an invited plenary on "Building a Community Model" by Gokhan Danabasoglu (NCAR/CESM). (Links to the recordings of the science talks are included at the end of this summary).

Over the two days, there were also 3 discussion breakouts that focused on: (1) Community Building (2) Short-term ACCESS-NRI plans and (3) ACCESS-NRI Long-term planning.  

We received a very positive feedback from the community, with a strong support to continue providing hybrid and online options and to include more Science talks in future workshops, as well as lots of great suggestions to improve the group discussions.

Overview 

The following lists outline the broad conclusions from the ACCESS-NRI Community Workshop, particularly highlighting the feedback that emerged from multiple groups across the community. 

Priority tasks for ACCESS-NRI: 

• Establish community working groups that will assist with prioritisation and resource allocation.
• Develop model evaluation tools that are modular, well-supported and specific for each domain.
• Establish a repository for consistent and relevant data collections needed by each community, following FAIR principles.
• Design an efficient and well-documented post-processing pipeline to create CMOR-ised output from ACCESS models.
• Create scalable diagnostic utilities, including a supported diagnostic environment, built on a system of data discoverability (along the lines of intake-esm).
• Optimise the performance and configuration of the UM to improve speed, and implement in higher and lower resolution coupled configurations.
• Establish a mechanism to get code into the UM to create a true community model.
• Documentation and training for all software that is developed and/or supported by ACCESS-NRI.
• Run flagship model simulations of key configurations to serve as baselines for the community.
• Distribute information on model cost/efficiency and improve/optimise configurations.
• Users to be given license to contribute code/data/documentation to community.
• Organise future workshops (annual NRI + other communities)
• Flexible, relocatable regional model configurations (atmosphere-land and ocean-sea ice).
• Payu and ROSE/CYLC interoperability (and training/documentation).
• Design and scope out CMIP7 configuration(s)

 Longer term ambitions (>2 years): 

• Coupled regional ocean-atmosphere configurations
• Include ice sheet model into future ACCESS-ESM (with solid earth?)
• Prepare for exascale, commercial cloud, workforce needs and other disruptors.