Australian Government - BLUElink

BLUElink is the Australian Government’s newest investment in ocean forecasting and research that will benefit maritime and commercial operations, Defence applications, safety-at-sea, sustainability of the marine environment and regional and global climate. Three of Australia’s leading organisations involved in oceanography - CSIRO through the Wealth from Oceans Flagship, the Bureau of Meteorology and the Royal Australian Navy - formed a unique partnership to initiate Project BLUElink in 2002.

BLUElink has delivered an ocean forecasting system that provides timely forecasts of the oceans around Australia. For the first time, a seven-day forecast of temperature, salinity and currents can be produced to identify and predict the complex movement of Australia’s offshore and coastal waters. This system will be validated and enhanced in the next phase of the project, BLUElink II, which ends in 2010. Further improvements will include the development of near-shore wave forecasting and a coupled (ocean-atmosphere) tropical cyclone prediction system.

CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology Research Centre have collaborated to provide the scientific intelligence for the BLUElink project. Together, the two agencies also operate the High-Performance Computing and Communications Centre that provides the essential computational power needed to run the ocean forecasting system. The Royal Australian Navy provided an important national security perspective and is a significant end user of the ocean forecast products generated by BLUElink.

Australia’s need for a regional ocean forecasting system is compelling. The Australian continent is bounded by three ocean basins and influenced by key oceanic features (the Indonesian through-flow system of currents as well as El Niño and La Niña) that affect rainfall across the continent. Nearer to the coast there is a continually evolving system of ocean eddies generated in the Tasman Sea from the East Australian Current, and in Western Australian waters from the world’s longest continuous ocean current, the Leeuwin Current. Australia’s ocean territory is nearly twice the size of its land area; with 90 per cent of the Australian population living within 50 kilometres of the coast. There has been a significant financial investment in coastal structures associated with economically critical mining, shipping, and oil and gas extraction. Oceanic conditions also influence wild fisheries and most aquaculture endeavours.