B.CCH.8130 - Forewarned is Forearmed: managing the impacts of extreme climate events (SARDI project)

Summary

The Forewarned is Forearmed project provided information to Australian farmers on the likelihood of climate extremes at a seasonal and muti-week time period. The SARDI Climate Applications component of the project was to ensure two-way communication between the Bureau of Meteorology researchers designing and developing extreme climate forecast products and the wine grape and grains industry. This was achieved by preparing industry engagement plans, convening industry reference groups and providing feedback to the Bureau researchers on the interpretation of five operational products.

Objectives

SARDI Climate Applications was responsible for four objectives. As discussed in Section 2, all objectives were achieved.

• Objective 1. To work with GRDC and Wine Australia to design industry engagement plans for climate extreme information.
• Objective 2. To convene industry reference groups and provide structured feedback on prototype climate extreme information to Bureau of Meteorology researchers.
• Objective 3. To identify decisions and model response scenarios.
• Objective 4. To develop extreme climate risk management guidelines (generic, grains and wine grape).

Key findings

The results that SARDI Climate Applications was responsible for included 1) ensuring a high level of industry engagement through the grains and wine grape industry reference group, 2) coordinating and providing feedback from industry to BoM on the design and interpretation of forecast products along with priority weather and climate risks in the wine grape and grains industry 3) communication of climate science to the grains and wine grape industries and 4) risk management packages that explored frameworks to have dialogue between growers faced with climate risky decisions and climate scientists with information.

Benefits to industry

The FWFA project is the first time that Australian farmers have had access to forecasts of climate extremes at a multiweek and seasonal time scale. The main legacy of the project is the suite of five operational forecast products on the BoM website. We worked with the grains and wine grape Industry Reference Groups to prioritise the weather and climate risks and ensured that these risks are addressed by the forecast products.

SARDI Climate Applications addressed the challenging task of how forecast information can be applied to farm level decision making.

Future research

The FWFA project has provided more complete access to the information in BoM Forecasts. Forecasts will improve, but there are good theoretical reasons to expect a wide range of outcomes at multiweek and seasonal timescales. If the ‘plume is the forecast’ we need to continue to work on ways to communicate information that there is a signal towards drier, wetter, hotter, drier but even with a wet signal, there are quite dry model runs. Thinking clearly about climate risky decisions without the forecast is a useful first step.