The Australian Research Council (ARC) recently announced $1.1M of funding for a new 4-year COSIMA project. The new project is funded under the ARC’s Linkage Project scheme, and is supported by 4 industry partners: The Department of Defence, Bureau of Meteorology, Australian Antarctic Division and CSIRO. This funding will continue to support the Australian ocean and sea ice modelling community to develop and distribute open source model configurations.
The aims of the proposal are to:
- Configure, evaluate and publish the next-generation MOM6 ocean model and CICE6 sea ice model, culminating in a new, world-class Australian ocean-sea ice model: “ACCESS-OM3”;
- Advance Australian capacity to model the ocean’s biogeochemical cycles and surface waves, including the feedback between waves, sea ice, biogeochemistry and ocean circulation; and
- Build on the success of COSIMA to establish deep ties between Australia’s leading ocean-sea ice modelling institutions, while maintaining ACCESS-OM2 for ongoing research projects and operational products.
Work on the new project is expected to begin in 2021, initially focussing on the adoption of the MOM6 ocean model for regional applications. A schematic of the intended workflow can be found in the figure below.
As well as developing new model configurations, the new COSIMA project will have a stronger emphasis on developing tools for data analysis, data sharing and publication. The new project will start with a kick-off meeting in the first half of 2021 (details to be announced).