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: What caused the rapid decline in Antarctic sea ice in 2016?

IAntarctic sea ice extent underwent a rapid decline in the spring of 2016 and is still well below average now. CLEX researchers have tied the decline to natural variability of...

Research brief: Algorithm reveals how plants respond to warming climate

The capacity of plant species to cope with increasing growth temperature is one of the key determinants in range shifts and local extinction of species. This response to...

Research brief: How ENSO drives Australian heatwaves

Heatwaves are prolonged periods of excessive heat, driven by various physical mechanisms. We know that one important mechanism that drives heatwaves over Australia is the El...

Research brief: Building resilience today to reduce future heatwave impacts

We know that weather extremes can be devasting to human health, and some of these events - mainly temperature extremes - are increasing in their frequency, intensity and...

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Publications

Research briefs

Research brief: 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...

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,...

Research brief: How well can climate models simulate interactions between cool and dry conditions under the current climate?

Hot days are expected to become more frequent with climate change. Heat extremes can be exacerbated by dry conditions due to a lack of evaporative cooling. This has been shown to...

Research brief: 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...