Asthmatics and those affected by polluted environments living around major cities along Australia’s east coast could find life much harder over the next 50 years as stronger inversion layers caused by climate change trap more pollution.
Past observations suggest future global warming may eventually be twice as warm as projected by climate models under business-as-usual scenarios and sea levels may rise 6m at 2°C.
The application of a simple carbon balance model, combined with a data assimilation approach, has the potential to improve the process understanding embedded in models, which is used to predict responses of the carbon cycle to climate change.
Convective parameterizations are widely believed to be essential for realistic simulations of the atmosphere, but are crude in today's weather and climate models. CLEX researchers, report on what happens when a number of these models are run with these schemes simply turned off.
In contrast to expectations, tropical thunderstorms without cold pools actually intensify, demonstrating unequivocally that cold pools can be detrimental to convection. Further investigations suggest that organised systems become maintained through atmospheric wave-convection interactions, which is a significantly different process to the established theory.
Centre of Excellence researchers have identified 12 marine heatwave types off the east coast of Tasmania, a location recognised as a global warming hotspot. Here the average sea surface temperatures here have been rising at four times the global average and trends in marine heatwaves are showing significant increases in number.
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 revealed the Southern Ocean mixes water between the depths and surface far more easily than previously thought.
An international study in Nature Communications co-authored by researchers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes (CLEX) and the Institute of Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS) reveals globally marine heatwaves have increased over the past century in number, length and intensity as a direct result of warming oceans.
New research published in Nature Geoscience has found that climate engineering that modifies the properties of the land surface in highly populated areas and agricultural areas over North America, Europe and Asia could reduce extreme temperatures there by up to 2-3°C.
There are clear winners and losers for wind power generation across Australia in the century ahead even though climate change will have little impact on wind speeds, according to new research by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes and School of Photovoltaic and Renewable Energy Engineering at UNSW.