User Training for the Australian Climate Modelling Community

The Australian Earth System Simulator (ACCESS-NRI) is a national research infrastructure supporting Australian climate modelling researchers and enabling critical climate science relevant to the Australian population. The User Training Team plays an important role in ensuring that the software and tools built by ACCESS-NRI software engineers are useful and actually used by the stakeholder communities. Specifically, our team supports researchers in understanding how to run Australian climate models, how to analyse the model output, and how to compare this output with climate observations. In this presentation, we will present our multi-faceted training approach that spans in-person and virtual events, recorded video tutorials, hackathons, and documentation. For this presentation, the focus is on our documentation approach, where we have set up what we call the Hive - an online, publicly accessible documentation portal that includes content released and curated by the ACCESS-NRI team, alongside resources contributed by the Australian climate community. There are various aspects of the Hive, including the Hive docs, which serve as a hub of all model-related documentation, and the Hive Discourse Forum to enable researchers to network and engage with fellow peers and ask questions. Finally, we will share our strong emphasis on open, collaborative, and community-driven practices in terms of making ACCESS-NRI tools accessible and useful to our stakeholders.