The ocean plays a critical role in the climate system by transferring heat from the tropics toward the poles, helping to regulate regional climates. How this heat transport may change in the future remains a first order question in climate science.
Centre Director Prof Andy Pitman who has been awarded an Order of Australia (AO) “for distinguished service to science as a leading researcher, particularly of climate systems and the environment”.
It’s normal for cities to be warmer than surrounding rural areas at night but researchers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes at Monash University found heatwaves make this difference almost two and a half times greater under some heatwave conditions.
The Australian FLUXNET data provide perhaps the world’s most valuable observations for building and evaluating the land models needed for projecting future droughts and heatwaves.
Antarctic sea ice extent underwent a rapid decline in the spring of 2016 and is still well below average now. CLEX researchers have tied the decline to natural variability of both the atmosphere and ocean in two articles published in Nature Communications this month.
Researchers develop a novel algorithm that should enable improved prediction of the function of global ecosystems in a warming climate.
By employing an atmosphere-only version of ACCESS, CLEX researchers generated multiple sea surface temperature patterns of the same El Nino and La Nina events, and assessed how this influenced heatwaves over various Australian regions.
A focus on building resilience in health and health infrastructure is needed to deal with the future effects of extreme events – both due to climate change and climate variability.
New research in Nature Climate Change suggests droughts may not increase as a result of climate change. This finding resulted from researchers investigating an apparent climate model contradiction that saw climate change projections of the 21st Century produce increased droughts along with more run-off and a greening of the landscape
Under future global warming, models shows increases in the wettest day of the season or year exceeds the range of changes explained by natural variability in most land areas.