The Attribution & Risk research programme improves the understanding of changes in climate extremes, such as heatwaves, extreme rainfall and droughts. It is clear that anthropogenic climate change is already influencing some aspects of these extremes and will continue to do so in the future. Attributing the cause of these changes and assessing their future risk is key to reducing the vulnerability of our natural and economic systems to these events.
In this research program we assess and improve the quality of our observations, our process understanding and the capability of our models to simulate extreme events. We also develop new methods using machine learning, an untapped tool in this area with game-changing potential.
Attributing the cause of these changes and assessing their future risk is key to reducing the vulnerability of our natural and economic systems to these events.
We research the following two overarching questions:
- How do the relative roles of large-scale, regional and local-scale processes and their interactions shape Australian extremes, and govern their changes?
- Can machine-learning/statistical approaches be used to improve the representation of scale interactions, processes and projection of the risk of extremes?
