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”.
It’s normal for cities to be warmer than surrounding rural areas at night but researchers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes at Monash University found heatwaves make this difference almost two and a half times greater under some heatwave conditions.
Bella Blanche writes about spending time on the vast Macfarlane Station in Tambo, Queensland and introduces a methodology to assess risks posed by climate change, and the vulnerability of the native rangeland resources located west of the Great Dividing Range.
If you are a stormchaser or just someone who loves the theatre of wind, lightning, heavy rain and hail when a storm whips through, then you are perfectly placed to help climate science with the new WeatheX app.