This review brings together a new understanding of the ocean-atmosphere system in the Indian Ocean since the last comprehensive review, describing the Indian Ocean circulation patterns, air-sea interactions and climate variability.
In this paper, as part of the Future Seas project, the researchers built upon previous work by using a foresighting scenario analysis technique to envision two alternative possible futures for society by 2030, in the context of the challenge of climate change adaptation and mitigation.
During the 2020 La Nina, many areas of Australia received near average to severely below-average rainfall, particularly during November. CLEX researchers found that several compounding factors contributed to the drier-than anticipated spring conditions.
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.