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Research brief: How to incorporate increased vapour pressure deficit into climate models

October 25, 2019 12:23 pm Published by Comments Off on Research brief: How to incorporate increased vapour pressure deficit into climate models

With projected increases in temperature in the future, the amount of water vapour that can be held at saturation – before it condenses into clouds, dew or water film – increases exponentially. As this deficit increases plants tend to close their stomata, which reduces water fluxes into the boundary layer. Do models currently capture the observed leaf-level response to increasing vapour pressure deficit? What about at very high levels of this deficit?

Research brief: Evaluating Himawari-8 cloud products

October 25, 2019 11:31 am Published by Comments Off on Research brief: Evaluating Himawari-8 cloud products

While the data from Himiwari-8 provides very useful data on clouds at relatively high resolution, researchers need to know if it produced any biases, particularly around cloud-top height and cloud-top temperature, whose roles are critical in shaping Earth’s climate. CLEX researchers and Australian colleagues compared the Himawari-8 data for both of these measures with existing datasets.

Research brief: Southern Ocean vortices are changing

October 22, 2019 2:26 pm Published by Comments Off on Research brief: Southern Ocean vortices are changing

The energy of vortices in the Southern Ocean has increased over the past two decades due to an increase in the mean amplitude of the vortices rather than an increase in their number.

Research brief: Inexpensive innovation improves Ensemble Kalman filter

October 22, 2019 1:42 pm Published by Comments Off on Research brief: Inexpensive innovation improves Ensemble Kalman filter

A known weakness of the Ensemble Kalman filter approach is that its ability to provide state estimates that closely match densely distributed observations is very limited. This paper describes a computationally inexpensive innovative variation on the technique that greatly ameliorates this difficulty.

Research brief: Rescuing centuries-old meteorological measurements

October 21, 2019 12:07 pm Published by Comments Off on Research brief: Rescuing centuries-old meteorological measurements

This paper documents the efforts of the international weather data rescue initiative ACRE, the International Surface Temperature Initiative and researchers that took part in workshops held in Bern, Switzerland, in June 2018 to rescue and digitize meteorological measurements taken prior to 1850 from around the world.

Research brief: Gravity waves cause unusual turbulence

October 15, 2019 4:18 pm Published by Comments Off on Research brief: Gravity waves cause unusual turbulence

This research uses commercial aircraft data and high-resolution simulations to study a case in 2005 over the United States where severe turbulence was encountered about 50km away from a large mesoscale convective system. Of relevance, current aviation turbulence avoidance guidelines recommend avoiding storms by 32 km (20 miles).

Enter the Plastisphere

October 3, 2019 11:33 am Published by Comments Off on Enter the Plastisphere

Intergenerational equity was the theme of last weekend. On Friday I attended the Climate Strike in Melbourne. The crowd was massive as people of all ages and all walks of life gathered to tell the leaders of the world that we wanted real action on climate change.

Safeguarding the world’s largest tuna fishery

October 2, 2019 12:03 pm Published by Comments Off on Safeguarding the world’s largest tuna fishery

New research has used a combination of records from captains and scientific observers, FAD tracking data, ocean models and cutting edge simulation methods to reveal for the first time the trajectories and potential impact FADs may have on fisheries around Pacific island nations.

Does global warming cause droughts, drying or increased aridity?

September 20, 2019 3:06 pm Published by Comments Off on Does global warming cause droughts, drying or increased aridity?

In an hour-long talk to a business forum, Andy Pitman said: “there is no link between climate change and drought”. Given the audience were not climate scientists, or interested in the physics of the climate, this statement was one word too brief. Andy fully admits he should have said: “there is no direct link between climate change and drought”.