Oceanum has released a new suite of global and regional wave climate projections, one of the most comprehensive wave datasets available. Spanning more than 400 years of simulated wave data, it provides an unparalleled view of past, present, and future ocean states, including:
– Global projections from the WAVEWATCH III model.
– High-resolution (5km) nested projections for New Zealand using the SWAN model.
– Forcing from leading CMIP6 climate models (ACCESS-CM2 and EC-Earth3).
– A 30-year historical period (1985-2015) together with future projections to 2100 under moderate (SSP2-4.5) and high (SSP3-7.0) emission scenarios.
While the global models use the raw CMIP6 outputs (https://wcrp-cmip.org/cmip-phases/cmip6/), the regional models utilise the recently released NIWA atmospheric downscalings. These regional atmospheric models offer significant improvements in representing New Zealand’s complex coastal topography, resulting in more accurate wave projections.
Understanding our changing oceans is critical, but accessing and analysing large-scale climate data is typically a major hurdle. To remove that barrier, we’ve made this entire dataset of analysis-ready wave parameters, statistics, and spectra seamlessly accessible through the Oceanum Datamesh (LINK).
This dataset also includes an unprecedented amount of wave spectra, a feature highly unusual for climate runs. Oceanum always believes in the value of spectral output (ref spectral post), and climate runs are no different. Not only do these data allow unique insight into the changing wave climate, but the dense global output also means that the methodology used for the New Zealand regional runs could potentially be replicated anywhere in the world using these boundary conditions.
We’ve published a series of Jupyter notebooks to guide you through inspecting, visualising, and analysing the data.
Get started with the notebooks on GitHub: https://github.com/oceanum-io/notebooks/tree/main/oceanum-cmip6-projections-tutorial
https://github.com/oceanum-io/notebooks/tree/main/oceanum-cmip6-projections-tutorial
This work is part of the Endeavour Programme Te Ao Hurihuri: Te Ao Hou—Our Changing Coast. We are 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.
