Hidden away in this week's federal Budget was the funding of ACCESS, the Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator, to become a National Research Infrastructure (NRI).
ACCESS is Australia's climate and weather model and as Professor Andy Hogg from the Australian National University College of Science explained, ACCESS is a framework for several different models of the atmosphere, oceans, land, and sea ice to understand the behaviour of the Earth system as a whole.
"ACCESS is used for a lot of different things; it's used for any prediction of future weather and climate in Australia, across all timescales, and it's also used particularly in the university sector as a research tool to understand how they ocean behaves or the climate system or the atmosphere," Hogg told ZDNet.
ACCESS is used mostly by climate researchers across the Bureau of Meteorology, CSIRO, and the university sector.
Currently, ACCESS is maintained by the different institutions that use it, volunteering their funds to support the model.
But the AU$7.6 million allocated over three years in the federal Budget will provide funding directly to the model itself.
"By providing that secure funding line for the model, then there will be a team of software engineers, for example, who will work on the model to improve the model for the benefit of all researchers," Hogg said.
"The reason I think this is really significant is because most of the other research infrastructure funding in Australia is for hardware, for machines, a big computer or for a mass spectrometer or a telescope. What's different here is that the government has essentially recognised that software is infrastructure and they've provided the funding to curate and develop that software for the benefit of researchers.
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