Wenhui Zhao is a PhD student in the school of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment, Monash University. Wenhui is focusing on employing available satellite products to develop a climatology of the clouds over the GBR, establishing their microphysical and macrophysical properties and investigating relationships between cloud properties and coral bleaching events.

The Great Barrier Reef is known to face a number of threats, great and small, including widespread coral bleaching events. These coral bleaching events have been widely attributed to climate change processes, where the coral has experienced increased heat stress due to sustained increases in the ocean temperature. And clouds play a fundamental role governing the sea surface temperature over the Great Barrier Reef by regulating the incoming solar radiation. So our fundamental aim is to investigate key climate-cloud interactions over the Great Barrier Reef and to investigate relationships between cloud properties and coral bleaching events.