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Research brief: Large scale monsoon circulation impacts Indian Ocean convection

November 25, 2019 12:15 pm Published by Comments Off on Research brief: Large scale monsoon circulation impacts Indian Ocean convection

This paper investigates the annual cycle in cloud and rainfall measurements over the western equatorial Indian Ocean. While there is a single period of strong rainfall over the region during December-January each year, there are two periods of increased high-top clouds associated with convection.

Research brief: Aridity index too simplistic for climate projections

November 6, 2019 11:20 am Published by Comments Off on Research brief: Aridity index too simplistic for climate projections

CLEX researchers and colleagues found the Aridity Index was too simplistic to capture the many aspects that define landscape aridity, including the amount of rainfall, water resources and vegetation productivity, and is a poor indicator of future aridity changes.

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.