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.

Read the full article on the ZDNet website, featuring Prof Andy Hogg