Important news for climate resilience and coastal planning in New Zealand.
Building on our recent announcement of global and regional wave climate projections, Oceanum and Calypso Science are excited to share a significant follow-up in our understanding of New Zealand’s changing oceans. This new work introduces SCHISM-based ocean model projections, further enhancing the insights gained from the Endeavour Programme Te Ao Hurihuri: Te Ao Hou—Our Changing Coast.
These new projections utilize the same leading CMIP6 climate models (ACCESS-CM2 and EC-Earth3) and emission scenarios (SSP2-4.5 and SSP3-7.0) as our previous wave climate projections. They are run on an unstructured grid with resolutions ranging from 5km down to an unprecedented 100m. This allows for a greatly improved representation of New Zealand’s complex coastal topography and dynamic ocean processes compared to global scale models.
Understanding our changing oceans is critical, and these high-resolution SCHISM-based projections provide an unparalleled view of future ocean states, offering vital data for climate resilience and coastal planning initiatives across New Zealand.
We are proud to continue this joint project between Oceanum and Calypso Science, building on the foundations laid by the Endeavour Programme. We remain grateful to GNS for program leadership, to the Ministry of Business for funding the programme, and to NIWA for access to the New Zealand wind projection data.
🔗 Get started with the notebooks on GitHub:
https://github.com/oceanum-io/notebooks/tree/main/oceanum-cmip6-projections-tutorial
