Variability in urban land-use results in microclimatic variability across a city that is not picked up by government weather station networks. Crowdsourced weather stations can fill these gaps.
Mathilde Ritman describes her journey as a second-year undergraduate student into a CLEX research project with Linden Ashcroft. It led to a publication, a massive learning curve in coding, stints with the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO, and opened a path to a career in climate science.
CLEX researchers and colleagues used a land-surface model that considered groundwater dynamics to explain how groundwater sustains transpiration and eases plant heat pressure during the heatwaves that occurred during the Millennium Drought and the 2017-2019 severe drought over southeast Australia.
The Australian bushfires of the 2019/2020 summer had far-reaching effects. It has now been revealed in new research published in Nature that the smoke produced a phytoplankton bloom larger in area than all of Australia, thousands of kilometres away in the Southern Ocean between New Zealand and South America.
Coral bleaching events have been reported over the Great Barrier Reef during La Niña events and the neutral phase of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, when large-scale sea-surface temperatures may be cooler than normal. How does this occur?
Predicting how much primary production will further increase in the Arctic Ocean in coming decades depends on the interplay between the increase in light for primary producers, as the sea ice extent and thickness decrease, and the availability of food in the form of nutrients, such as nitrate, phosphate, and silica.
Using model simulations of the movement of tuna distributions across the tropical Pacific subject to projected ocean changes, the researchers found that without strong mitigation efforts, tuna distributions are likely to shift away from island fishing zones.
Drought is a major risk to Australia with extended periods of drought affecting our social, economic and environmental systems. The newly released report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change contains significant new assessments of the science and future projections of drought.
To better understand the implications of the latest climate science for Tasmania, this brief combines information from the IPCC AR6 WG1 report, with regional assessments that contributed to the UTAS Blueprint for a climate-positive Tasmania, and expertise from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes (CLEX). The regional information is based on Tasmania-specific downscaled modelling undertaken by Climate Futures for Tasmania.
It has long been suggested in the literature, and discussed casually by meteorologists, that rainfall in Melbourne often occurs as lines of precipitation. However, this had yet to be quantified. CLEX researchers analysed 15 years of radar data from the Australian Radar Archive, using an objective method to identify and track these ‘linear systems’ based on radar reflectivity, size, and shape characteristics.