This release is to advise the community that an ACCESS Oversight Committee has been formed initially comprising Christian Jakob, Rachel Law, Helen Cleugh, Andy Pitman, Tony Hirst, Peter May, David Karoly and Ben Evans. Terms of reference have been agreed to by the group and can be found at the end of this document.
The Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) Model Analysis Workshop was held in Barcelona from March 25-28, 2019, and provided the first opportunity for results from CMIP6 models to be discussed and presented by the modelling community.
Indian Ocean convection caused a powerful planetary wave that led to a drought in South America and a marine heatwave in the South Atlantic that lasted for months.
An international team, led by Australian researchers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes (CLEX) and the Institute for Marine and Antarctic (IMAS) studies, have published in Nature Communications the first global assessment of the major drivers of marine heatwaves.
CLEX researchers with the Bureau of Meteorology have created a new 20-year-long regularly updated precipitation dataset for Australia using 50 radar sites. This will allow researchers to examine the climatology of extreme events, follow cloud processes, estimate hail size, determine cloud top height and much more.
Dr Mandy Freund and CLEX colleagues have produced a world first 400-year long record of El Niño activity. It's a record that was previously considered impossible to extract from coral cores.
CLEX researchers and colleagues from Australia, Germany and the US have quantified the effect of climate extremes, such as droughts or heatwaves, on the yield variability of staple crops around the world. Overall, year-to-year changes in climate factors during the growing season of maize, rice, soy and spring wheat accounted for 20%-49% of yield fluctuations, according to research published in Environmental Research Letters.
The increase in frequency and intensity of ocean heatwaves over the past 30 years has had profound impacts on certain marine ecosystems and significantly impacted the industries that depend on them. According to new research in Nature Climate Change, marine heatwaves are now a clear and present threat to global biodiversity.
The CLEX Career Development Award for Women and Underrepresented groups is offered every year to promote the leadership development amongst our women and other underrepresented groups within CLEX.
Centre Director Prof Andy Pitman who has been awarded an Order of Australia (AO) “for distinguished service to science as a leading researcher, particularly of climate systems and the environment”.