Access WA Climate Projections

Find out about the 4 km and 20 km climate projections available for WA.
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Access 4 km South West WA Climate Projections  

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High-resolution 4 km climate projections are now available for South West WA from the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI). The projections can be accessed through the NCI data catalogue, together with additional relevant resources. The supporting documentation provided will assist users in understanding the modelling approach, emissions scenarios, and appropriate uses of the data.  

These projections have been developed as a part of the Climate Science Initiative and provide more detailed information about future climate conditions in WA. They have been produced by dynamically downscaling from the five most representative and latest global climate model outputs for WA. These projections provide the most detailed and comprehensive climate change information for the state to date, extending from 1951 to the year 2100 under three future emission scenarios, known as shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs). To learn more about the SSPs used in the CSI program see CSI shared socioeconomic pathways | Western Australian Government. 

At this resolution, these projections are particularly useful because the models are at convection permitting scale, and they can capture local influences such as topography and land use as well as better simulate the extreme weather. Learn more about convection permitting modelling by reading our fact sheet. They are therefore suitable for applications where local details matter more, such as assessments of extreme events including but not limited to storms, floods, and extreme fire weather.  

The 4 km modelling focuses on South West WA. Additional projections for North West WA are in production.  

20km climate projections for rainfall and temperature 

 
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The CSI has released regional climate projections at a 20 km resolution for temperature and rainfall using the latest available climate models, in line with other national and international efforts.
 
These projections are available to technical users to download from the Shared Location Information Platform (SLIP) on Data WA.
  
Use the Technical factsheet for 20 km temperature and rainfall climate projections, which provides technical users with key consideration for accessing and working with the climate projections datasets hosted on Data WA, including data formats and structure, and some important notes on data interpretation.

The 20 km data covering the entire Australian continent is also available on the NCI catalogue. 

When you are accessing any of the CSI climate projections, please refer to the several fact sheets and infographics that help explain climate modelling concepts, particularly if you are using climate science projection data for the first time.   

Western Australia climate projections: summary 

This document provides a summary of the changes in climate and sea levels likely to occur over the coming decades in Western Australia.
 
It is an easy-to-understand resource designed to support decision makers undertaking high-level climate risk assessments, or to guide general adaptation planning in the community.
 
Please note this resource is based on Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) and the previous phase results from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 (CMIP5). The new 20 km projections described above use Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) which have been developed using the latest-generation CMIP6 global model simulations. For a description of these climate scenarios, please see our handy infographic describing the differences between RCPs and SSPs.

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