The Australian Community Climate and Earth-System Simulator (ACCESS) is a coupled climate and earth system simulator being developed as a joint initiative of the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO in cooperation with the university community in Australia. The main aim of ACCESS is to develop a national approach to climate and weather prediction model development. Planning for ACCESS development commenced in 2005 and significant progress has been made subsequently. ACCESS-based numerical weather prediction (NWP) systems were implemented operationally by the Bureau in September 2009 and were marked by significantly increased forecast skill of close to one day for three-day forecasts over the previously operational systems. The fully-coupled ACCESS earth system model has been assembled and tested, and core runs have been completed and submitted for the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report. Significant progress has been made with ACCESS infrastructure including successful porting to both Solar and Vayu (National Computational Infrastructure (NCI)) machines and development of infrastructure to allow usage by university researchers. This paper provides a description of the NWP component of ACCESS and presents results from detailed verification of the system.

The Australian Government Bureau of Meteorology completed the installation of a network of 9 new wind profiling radars across mainland Australia in 2017, which complement an existing network of 5 profilers and 5 research systems. This results in a network of 14 operational, and 19 total, profilers across Australia and Davis Station in Antarctica. Four of the new profilers are higher power stratospheric tropospheric systems, designed to measure winds from near ground level to the tropopause, and maintain the upper air network in Australia where sonde launches are no longer available. Wind measurements in the near field of the radar are demonstrated to be both possible and accurate by comparison with co-located radiosondes. Quality control procedures producing winds of sufficient accuracy for presentation to forecasters and ingestion into global numerical weather prediction models are described. The Australian network data are available on the global telecommunications system and are currently being ingested into all major models. First results from impact studies on forecast error reduction in the Australian Community Climate and Earth Systems Simulator show remote stations have the greatest impact.

Atmospheric motion vectors (AMVs) have been generated continuously from Multifunctional Transport Satellite 1 Replacement (MTSAT-1R) radiance data (imagery) since 2005, and more recently from MTSAT-2, which are operated by the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA). These are the primary geostationary meteorological satellites observing the western Pacific, Asia, and the Australian region. The vectors are used operationally, for analysis in the Darwin Regional Forecast Office. The near-continuous AMVs have been stringently error characterized and used in near-real-time trials to gauge their impact on operational regional numerical weather prediction (NWP), using four-dimensional variational data assimilation (4DVAR). The use of these locally generated hourly vectors (the only hourly AMV source in the region at the time) and 4DVAR has resulted in both improved temporal and spatial data coverage in the operational regional forecast domain. The beneficial impact of these data on the Bureau of Meteorology's (Bureau's) current operational system is described. After these trials, the hourly MTSAT AMVs were introduced into the Bureau's National Meteorological and Oceanographic Centre's (NMOC) operational NWP suite for use by the operational Australian Community Climate Earth System Simulator (ACCESS) regional and global models, ACCESS-R and ACCESS-G, respectively. Examples of their positive impact on both midlatitude and tropical cyclone forecasts are presented.