A daily dataset of sea breeze objects over Australia (1979-2024)

This record contains a dataset of sea breeze objects derived from the Bureau of Meteorology Atmospheric Regional Reanalysis for Australia, version 2, with convective-scale configuration (BARRA-C2, Su et al., 2025). BARRA2 is made available by the Bureau of Meteorology under a CC-BY 4.0 license via the Australian National Comptutational Infrastructure Sea breeze objects are defined on a time-latitude-longitude grid, at around 4.4 km hoirzontal spacing at hourly intervals. The data here are provided as a binary mask on a grid in .zarr format. The mask provided here has been resampled to daily intervals at each grid point from hourly data, by considering if a sea breeze is present on a given day. A day is either defined by UTC, Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST, UTC + 10), or Australian Western Standard Time (AWST, UTC + 8), and each are provided as separate .zarr directories: UTC: sea_breeze_mask_utc.zarr AEST: sea_breeze_mask_aest.zarr AWST: sea_breeze_mask_awst.zarr For the AEST and AWST data, sea breeze objects occurring before 0900 or after 2100 are not included in the resampling. Sea breeze obects are defined using a moisture frontogenesis approach based on surface winds and specific humidity, with further filtering of objects using a set of morphological and physical characteristics. Filtering settings are provided in the .zarr metadata. Details on the methods can be found in Brown et al. (2025a). Code to produce the objects, and accomanying documentation, can be found in Brown et al. (2025b) or on GitHub. The .zarr directories provided here can be loaded into Python using xarray following the code below. This was tested with the following python packages: xarray version 2023.2.0 zarr version 2.13.3 import xarray as xr f = xr.open_dataset("sea_breeze_mask_utc.zarr", engine="zarr") Additional details: Spatial extent: 108.02E to 158.50E, 45.69S to 6.93S Temporal extent: 1979-01-01 to 2024-12-31