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Research brief: Assessing surface heat flux products from observations over the Australian sector of the Southern Ocean

November 25, 2019 1:15 pm Published by Comments Off on Research brief: Assessing surface heat flux products from observations over the Australian sector of the Southern Ocean

To better understand the biases and ultimately improve the quality of our climate records, CLEX researches and their collaborators undertook in situ measurements using the NOAA Physical Sciences Division flux system during the Clouds, Aerosols, Precipitation, Radiation, and Atmospheric Composition over the Southern Ocean (CAPRICORN) experiment in 2016.

Research brief: Convective extremes don’t always coincide with warm extremes during El Niños

November 25, 2019 12:46 pm Published by Comments Off on Research brief: Convective extremes don’t always coincide with warm extremes during El Niños

This study found in CMIP5 models that are able to simulate both types of events, that convective extremes do not always coincide with warm extremes. The disassociation becomes more distinct under greenhouse warming with higher occurrences of convective extremes than warm extremes.

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.