Article
BAMOS November 2025
2025 ACCESS community workshop: my experience as a first-time attendee
Dr Ellie Ong, ARC Centre of Excellence for 21st Century Weather( ellie. ong @ unsw. edu. au)
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This year, I attended the ACCESS community workshop for the first time, and it was an eye-opening experience.
I had the chance to meet Australia’ s top scientific experts, listen to engaging talks, and learn about the latest advances in model development.
The workshop was held at the University of Melbourne( and online) from 8-12 September and brought together over 200 climate researchers, weather scientists and software engineers, including more than 130 students and early-career researchers.
Here, I share my reflection on the workshop and what made it so impactful.
A closer look at the workshop
For those new to ACCESS, it’ s the Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator. It underpins some of the most advanced climate and weather research in Australia, and its development is supported by ACCESS-NRI, Australia’ s National Research Infrastructure.
Held every year, the ACCESS community workshop provides a platform for researchers, users and developers of ACCESS models to share knowledge and collaborate.
This year’ s workshop started with a training day on Day 1, where participants learned how to run a selection of ACCESS models and analyse their outputs. Day 2 and 3 featured talks, lunchtime discussions and poster sessions, with plenty of room for participants to meet informally in between.
The plenary speakers gave incredible talks, sharing the latest results from both domestic and international teams. Highlights included Gokhan Danabasoglu’ s talk on high-resolution coupled model experiments and Georgy Falster’ s work using pacemaker experiments to understand how decreased Indo- Pacific sea surface temperature variability influences midlatitude droughts. Additionally, 9 parallel sessions explored a range of topics, including carbon reservoirs, regional modelling, Antarctic and Southern Ocean science and machine learning applications in climate science.
The workshop ended with featured meetings for the six ACCESS Community Working Groups( Atmosphere, Land Surface, Cryosphere, Machine learning for climate and weather, COSIMA and Earth System Modelling) on Day 4.
I primarily use ocean models to study tropical biases in coupled Earth System climate models, so it was a great opportunity to learn about the latest results in a range of adjacent areas. For example, I was able to attend talks on model development and their use to study the impacts of climate on Australian precipitation.
I also enjoyed participating in the individual community Working Groups discussions. I particularly liked the Earth System Model Working Group session on climate model evaluation in support of the ACCESS-Coupled Model 3 currently in development. In these sessions run by Wilma Huneke, Jemma Jeffree, Spencer Wong and Kieran Ricardo, it was encouraging to see earlycareer researchers like myself guiding discussions and sharing cool science. Another fun social highlight of the workshop was the Ocean Working Group’ s dinner cruise on the Yarra River.
Over the course of the event, I had the opportunity to hear about the latest progress in model development and talk to Australia’ s top software engineers and scientific experts. Particularly useful for me was sharing my plans and the initial results of my experiments with them, and getting feedback on my work. Their input has since allowed me to minimise the biases I see in my model runs. I have also been able to tweak my experimental design in the hopes of working around some of its limitations.
Overall, the ACCESS community workshop was an engaging few days full of great conversations and interesting ideas. I’ m glad to have met and learnt from many new people this week, and put faces to the names of those I have worked with all over the country. The more I engaged in the workshop and the community around ACCESS models, the more I reaped the benefits of being part of a cohesive modelling community. I strongly encourage scientists from all career stages to participate in such workshops and already look forward to the next one.
My reflection on the workshop
As a first-time attendee, I was surprised by the breadth and scale of research conducted with ACCESS models.
ACCESS Community Workshop group photo. Credit: Harshula Jayasuriya, ACCESS-NRI