Contacts for further details:

• This data record and associated research: Andrew Brown (andrewb1@student.unimelb.edu.au)
• BARPA data: Chun Hsu Su (chunhsu.su@bom.gov.au), Christian Stassen (Christian.Stassen@bom.gov.au), Harvey Ye (harvey.ye@bom.gov.au)

Introduction

This record contains data in support of Brown et al. (2024), including post-processed regional climate model data, automatic weather station observations, and post-processed reanalysis data over southeastern Australia for various time periods over December-Febrary months only (see descriptions below). This data relates to analysis of severe convective wind gusts in historical and future climate, with analysis scripts in this repository. The data are described here according to the directory structure of this record (noting the files and directories have been compressed into barpa_data.tgz), as well as the relevant data sources. 

Data sources

• The Bureau of Meteorology Atmospheric Regional Projections for Australia (BARPA). A regional climate model containing a regional (BARPA-R) and convection-permitting (BARPAC-M) configuration, with large-scale forcing from ERA-Interim (1990-2015) and ACCESS1-0 using a historical (1985-2005) and RCP8.5 (2039-2059) forcing. See Brown et al. (2024) and Su et al. (2021) for more details. Note that any reuse of this data should properly acknowledge the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. Note also that the BARPA data used here was produced as part of the Electricity Sector Climate Information project (with licence and disclaimers here), with more current BARPA versions (not used here) available at https://dx.doi.org/10.25914/z1x6-dq28. 
• Measured wind gusts from automatic weather stations (AWS). Gust data is provided by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, from 272 AWS locations over 2005-2015. Note that any reuse of this data should properly acknowledge the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.
• The ERA5 reanalysis from the European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (Hersbach 2020).
• The ERA-Interim reanalysis from the European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (Dee 2011).

/10min_points

This directory contains .csv files, with wind gust and related environmental data at 10-minute intervals at point locations, corresponding to automatic weather station locations. Data is available over 2005-2015. Files are named in the form barpac_m_aws_<state>.csv and barpac_m_aws_<state>_barpa_r_interp.csv. Here, <state> represents different administrative regions in southeast Australia, including New South Wales (nsw), Victoria (vic), South Australia (sa) and Tasmania (tas). See Figure 1 in Brown et al. (2024) for a map of station locations, that is also included in the /meta directory. The barpa_r_interp suffix indicates that the BARPAC-M wind gusts have been interpolated to the BARPA-R grid for comparison.

This data is used in Brown et al. (2024) for evaluation and analysis of BARPA wind gusts in the historical climate (forced by ERA-Interim). The user is directed to that paper for more information on data processing. For the .csv files here, column descriptions are provided in Table 1, below.

/daily_points

This directory contains .csv files, with data associated with daily maximum wind gusts at point locations. This data is derived from the 10min_points data described above, with the same column descriptions in Table 1, below. The different files in this directory are as follows:

• barpac_m_aws_dmax_obs.csv
  Daily maximum observed wind gust from AWS measurements, with associated wind gust ratio and environmental conditions from ERA5.

• barpac_m_aws_dmax_2p2km.csv
  Daily maximum simulated wind gust from BARPAC-M at closest grid point to AWS location, with associated wind gust ratio, lighting flash count, and environmental conditions from BARPA-R.

• barpac_m_aws_dmax_12km.csv
  Daily maximum simulated wind gust from BARPA-R at closest grid point to AWS location, with associated wind gust ratio, lightning flash count, and environmental conditions.

• barpac_m_aws_dmax_erai.csv
  Daily maximum simulated wind gust from ERA-Interim at closest grid point to AWS location, with associated wind gust ratio and environmental conditions from ERA5.

• barpac_m_aws_dmax_2p2km_barpa_r_interp.csv
  As in barpac_m_aws_dmax_2p2km.csv, but wind gusts are interpolated to the BARPA-R grid prior to calculating the daily maximum.

/monthly_nc

This directory contains monthly netcdf files at 12 km horizontal grid spacing, with post-processed BARPA data, relating to simulated severe convective wind gusts (from BARPAC-M), and their associated large-scale environments (from BARPA-R). This includes BARPAC-M and BARPA-R data that has been forced by the ACCESS1-0 global climate model, that is intended for analysis of future changes in severe convective wind events and environments. For further information, the user can refer to the internal file metadata, as well as Brown et al. (2024). The files in this directory are as follows (where <experiment> is either hist for historical climate forcing (1985-2005) or rcp for RCP8.5 climate forcing (2039-2059)):

• barpac_scws_<experiment>_monthly.nc
  Monthly counts of simulated severe convective wind events from BARPAC-M, for each type of environment (see cluster in Table 1).

• barpar_<experiment>_monthly.nc
  Monthly counts of favouable severe convective wind environments from BARPA-R (using bdsd, see Table 1), for each type of environment (see cluster in Table 1).

• barpac_scws_bdsd_<experiment>.nc
  Monthly counts of simulated severe convective wind events from BARPAC-M, that occur under favourable environmental conditions from BARPA-R. For each type of environment (see cluster in Table 1).

• barpac_max_<experiment>_monthly.nc
  Monthly maximum simulated severe convective wind gust, from BARPAC-M, for each type of environment (see cluster in Table 1).

/daily_nc

This directory contains monthly netcdf files at 12 km horizontal grid spacing, with daily maximum wind gusts from BARPAC-M, as well as the wind gust ratio (see wgr_4 in Table 1) and the type of convective environment (from BARPA-R, see cluster in Table 1). This includes BARPA data that has been forced by ERA-Interim and by ACCESS1-0. For further information, the user can refer to the file metadata, as well as Brown et al. (2024). The files in this directory are as follows (where <experiment> is either historical for historical climate forcing or rcp85 for RCP8.5 climate forcing, <forcing_model> is either erai for ERA-Interim or ACCESS1-0, <date1> is the file start date and <date2> is the file end date):

• barpa_scw_<forcing_model>_<experiment>_0_<date1>_<date2>.nc

/meta

Lists of AWS stations, for each administrative state, with a file containing column descriptions. Note that not all of the stations listed in these files are used for analysis. Fig1.jpeg is from Brown et al. (2024), showing the BARPAC-M domain (also defines the netcdf file spatial extents), and the location of AWS.

Table 1