CLEX, the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes

The Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes (CLEX) is a major initiative funded by the Australian Research Council. The Centre is an international research consortium of five Australian universities and a network of outstanding national and international partner organizations.

The Centre will improve our understanding of the processes that trigger or enhance extremes and build this understanding into our modelling systems. The improved predictions of climate extremes will enable improvements in how Australia copes with extremes now and in the future.

Breaking news

Research brief: Climate models under-represent tropical heating variations

We know that enormous amounts of heat are released in tropical thunderstorm clouds and that this heating plays an important role in maintaining global circulation patterns. But...
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Research brief: MAAT reveals hidden sources of model divergence

Climate models embody our understanding of how the terrestrial biosphere works. Processes within these models represent our current hypotheses and assumptions about how the...
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CLEX summer scholarships

The ARC Centre of Excellence Undergraduate Summer Scholarships in Climate Extremes are highly competitive scholarships intended to provide undergraduate students from Australian...
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Postgraduate opportunities at University of Melbourne

The CLEX node at University of Melbourne is offering several PhD scholarships on a competitive basis. Details of how to apply are at the bottom of this page....
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How predictable are land-atmosphere fluxes in different ecosystems?

A new study by CLEX researchers identifies regions of high and low predictability and will likely help improve land surface model evaluation. It focuses on observations of the...
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Understanding the origin of ENSO diversity for improved forecasts

A new paper published today in Nature reveals why forecasting ENSO events, and anticipating how they may change with global warming remains a significant challenge for climate...
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Research brief: New technique to select best model subset for extreme projections

Climate models are extremely useful tools for investigating how our climate may change in the future. However, all climate models exhibit biases that must be accounted for,...
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Research brief: Ecohydrological equilibrium approach improves modelling of LAI

How many leaves should a tree grow? This information is critical to climate models as the amount of leaf area per unit ground area, or leaf area index (LAI), helps determines the...
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Research briefs

New research rewrites Southern Ocean mixing calculations

World-first modelling research– which used several million CPU hours in Australia’s fastest supercomputer, Raijin, and ran calculations non-stop for over a year – has...
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More than photosynthesis reduced when plants under stress

The lack of correlation between photosynthesis and growth under "sink-limited" conditions (e.g. limited by nutrients, temperature and/or water stress) is...
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Marine heatwaves increase around Tasmania

Centre of Excellence researchers have identified 12 marine heatwave types off the east coast of Tasmania, a location recognised as a global warming hotspot. Average sea surface...
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Measuring changes in our atmosphere from seconds to decades

This paper, A census of atmospheric variability from seconds to decades, synthesises and summarises atmospheric variability on time scales from seconds to...
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Droughts inconsistently represented across climate models

Global climate models (GCMs) are essential for understanding future changes in droughts but it remains unclear how well these models simulate droughts. This study evaluated GCMs...
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Research brief: New technique to select best model subset for extreme projections

Climate models are extremely useful tools for investigating how our climate may change in the future. However, all climate models exhibit biases that must be accounted for,...
Read more

Research brief: Successful science outreach with social media

Over four years, the Norwegian Polar Institute’s (NPI) Ocean and Sea Ice team used the social media handle @oceanseaicenpi across Instagram, Twitter and Facebook to communicate...
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Research brief: Climate models under-represent tropical heating variations

We know that enormous amounts of heat are released in tropical thunderstorm clouds and that this heating plays an important role in maintaining global circulation patterns. But...
Read more

CLEX Research programs

Extreme rainfall

Heatwaves and cold air outbreaks

Drought

Climate variability and teleconnections