New research published in Nature Geoscience has found that climate engineering that modifies the properties of the land surface in highly populated areas and agricultural areas over North America, Europe and Asia could reduce extreme temperatures there by up to 2-3°C.
There are clear winners and losers for wind power generation across Australia in the century ahead even though climate change will have little impact on wind speeds, according to new research by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes and School of Photovoltaic and Renewable Energy Engineering at UNSW.
The Australian Academy of Science with 21 other Commonwealth National Academies of Science and societies as part of a consensus statement calling on the members at the next Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) to use the best available science to guide action on climate change. The call comes at a time when research has shown that the commitments of the Paris Accord agreed to by international governments will still put the world on track for temperatures 3°C above preindustrial temperatures.
Understanding which plant species can recover from drought, under what conditions and the processes involved, will help researchers predict plant mortality in response to global climate change. In response to drought, some species die because of embolism-induced hydraulic failure, while others recover, following rehydration. This research focuses on structures and processes that might allow some plants to recover from drought stress via embolism reversal.
The reduction in growth of plants restricted by limitations on nutrients, temperature and/or water stress, didn't just reduce photosynthesis but led to negative feedbacks in plant carbon balance processes.
When researchers compared the results derived from FLUXNET data with the results synthesised from the literature, they found substantial differences. As a result, they suggest a new benchmarking metric that could be used to test existing hypotheses embedded in climate models and have mapped a path forward involving using further detailed observations to improve the way coupling/decoupling processes currently represented in climate models.
This paper, A census of atmospheric variability from seconds to decades, synthesises and summarises atmospheric variability on time scales from seconds to decades through a phenomenological census. It focuses mainly on unforced variability in the troposphere, stratosphere, and mesosphere.
This study explored the key sources of uncertainty when scaling leaf-level understanding of water-use efficiency to ecosystem scales. The results provide key insights into interpreting (ecosystem-scale) eddy-covariance derived water-use efficiency in an ecophysiological context.
This paper combines existing global evapotranspiration estimates to create a new global product with an observationally constrained estimate of uncertainty. It utilises the latest release of ground-based estimates to show that even point-based evapotranspiration estimates have information about much larger spatial scales.
CLEX Chief Investigator Prof Christian Jakob at a recent Monash University STEM talk takes his audience into the world of climate models. It’s a talk that looks under the hood to see what powers modern climate models.