Past observations suggest future global warming may eventually be twice as warm as projected by climate models under business-as-usual scenarios and sea levels may rise 6m at 2°C.
The application of a simple carbon balance model, combined with a data assimilation approach, has the potential to improve the process understanding embedded in models, which is used to predict responses of the carbon cycle to climate change.
Convective parameterizations are widely believed to be essential for realistic simulations of the atmosphere, but are crude in today's weather and climate models. CLEX researchers, report on what happens when a number of these models are run with these schemes simply turned off.
This study evaluated GCMs for common drought metrics during the past 55 years. It found different models can produce very different simulations of drought, depending on the type of drought and metric analysed. The study points to a need to improve GCMs for droughts to reduce uncertainties in future projections.
Drawing on 5 years of experience as an editor for Geophysical Research Letters, Peter Strutton presented a talk that covered what happens between submission of a manuscript and eventual acceptance or rejection. Specific topics included the importance of cover letters, dealing with rejection, addressing reviewers’ comments and considerations around authorship.
In contrast to expectations, tropical thunderstorms without cold pools actually intensify, demonstrating unequivocally that cold pools can be detrimental to convection. Further investigations suggest that organised systems become maintained through atmospheric wave-convection interactions, which is a significantly different process to the established theory.
CLEX researchers writing in Nature Climate Change suggest a paradigm shift in how climate scientists approach climate change impact assessments. They suggest examining the system or potential catastrophe first instead of making the starting point a climate scenario.
Centre of Excellence researchers have identified 12 marine heatwave types off the east coast of Tasmania, a location recognised as a global warming hotspot. Here the average sea surface temperatures here have been rising at four times the global average and trends in marine heatwaves are showing significant increases in number.
World-first modelling research– which used several million CPU hours in Australia’s fastest supercomputer, Raijin, and ran calculations non-stop for over a year – has revealed the Southern Ocean mixes water between the depths and surface far more easily than previously thought.
In 2005 the Amazon experienced a once in a century drought. Five years later, in 2010, it was struck by an even worse drought, with even lower rainfall occurring in the dry season. However, the response of the Amazon forest to these two once-in-a-century events showed marked differences.