Evaluation of Present-Day CMIP6 Model Simulations of Extreme Precipitation and Temperature over the Australian Continent

Australia experiences a variety of climate extremes that result in loss life and economic environmental damage. This paper provides first evaluation the performance state-of-the-art Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) global models (GCMs) simulating over Australia. Here, we evaluate how well 37 individual CMIP6 GCMs simulate spatiotemporal patterns 12 by comparing against gridded observations (Australian Gridded Climate Dataset). is crucial for informing, interpreting, constructing multimodel ensemble future projections Australia, climate-resilience planning, GCM selection while conducting exercises like dynamical downscaling via GCMs. We find temperature (maximum-maximum -TXx, number summer days -SU, when maximum greater than 35 °C -Txge35) are reasonably well-simulated comparison to precipitation extremes. However, tend overestimate (underestimate) minimum (maximum) also typically struggle capture both extremely dry (consecutive -CDD) wet (99th percentile -R99p) extremes, thus highlighting underlying uncertainty capturing regional drought flood conditions. Typically UKESM1-0-LL, FGOALS-g3, from Met office Hadley Centre (HadGEM3-GC31-MM HadGEM3-GC31-LL) NOAA (GFDL-ESM4 GFDL-CM4) consistently show good performance. Our results same modelling group sharing key components have similar biases not highly independent.