Category: Research briefs
Research brief: New Zealand’s costliest floods caused by atmospheric rivers
The largest rivers on Earth are not on the ground, but in the sky. Our new study, published in Environmental Research Letters, showed that nine out of ten of the most expensive floods in New Zealand (2007-2017) occurred during an Atmospheric River event, and seven to all ten of the top ten most extreme rainfall events at eleven different locations occurred during Atmospheric Rivers.
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Research brief: New reporting format for leaf-level gas exchange data
In this study, the researchers propose a reporting format for leaf-level gas exchange data and metadata to provide guidance to data contributors on how to store data in repositories to maximise their discoverability, facilitate their efficient reuse, and add value to individual datasets.
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Research brief: The Black Summer and COVID impacts on Sydney and Melbourne air quality.
CLEX researchers and colleagues quantified the air quality impact of the Black Summer bushfires of 2019/20 and COVID-19 in the south-eastern states of Victoria and New South Wales (NSW) using a meteorological normalisation approach.
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Research brief: Most Australian heatwaves from moving systems, not blocked systems
The majority of heatwaves affecting south-eastern Australia are part of large and strong weather systems propagating across Australia, and not due to stationary or blocked weather systems as seen in some other regions of the world.
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Research brief: How gravity waves impact thunderstorm formation
Storms cause ripples in the wind that travel upwards and away from the clouds, much like a stone causes ripples when it is thrown in a pond. These can then affect the temperature and winds around the storms and make them grow, last longer, or die earlier.
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Research brief: ACCESS1 outperforms POAMA forecasting SPCZ
The researchers analysed the performance of the ACCESSS1 seasonal forecast model to predict the SPCZ position and rainfall over the period 1990-2012. ACCESSS1 performed better in simulating the SPCZ than the previous model, POAMA.
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Research brief: New global land-based precipitation dataset
CLEX researchers have developed a new global land-based daily precipitation dataset called Rainfall Estimates on a Gridded Network – REGEN – aimed at facilitating studies to understand changes and variability in several aspects of daily precipitation distributions, extremes and measures of hydrological intensity.
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Research brief: Southern ocean overturning circulation responds to SAM
CLEX researchers introduced a novel methodology to examine the Southern Ocean’s response to changing winds. They performed numerical simulations with a global ocean‐sea ice model suite that spans a hierarchy of spatial resolutions and driven by realistic atmospheric forcing conditions.
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Research brief: Revisiting the 1888 Centennial Drought
To shed more light on short droughts of the past, CLEX researchers took advantage of a newly released dataset from the Bureau of Meteorology to re-examine the infamous Centennial Drought of 1888. Using the new dataset along with historical station data, they analysed monthly rainfall variability across south eastern Australia throughout 1888.
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Research brief: The interaction of ocean basins may improve long-term climate predictions
An international team of authors led by NCAR scientist and CLEX PI Jerry Meehl, along with CLEX CIs and AIs, propose that the Pacific and Atlantic ocean basins are mutually interactive, with each basin influencing and responding to processes in the other basin.
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Research brief: Indian Ocean warming modulates global atmospheric circulation trends
Using atmospheric model experiments, researchers have shown that the warming of the tropical Indian Ocean relative to the other two tropical ocean basins can effectively control Walker Circulation changes in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans and influence climate far beyond the Indian Ocean region.
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Research brief: Land surface models struggle to reproduce evaporative processes
This paper details a new approach to evaluating the performance of land surface models, the component of climate and weather models that simulates land surface processes. It focuses on the cycle of solar radiation during daylight hours and how the energy from the sun is exchanged between the land surface and lower atmosphere.
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Research Briefs
Research brief: New Zealand’s costliest floods caused by atmospheric rivers
Research brief: New reporting format for leaf-level gas exchange data
Research brief: The Black Summer and COVID impacts on Sydney and Melbourne air quality.
Research brief: Most Australian heatwaves from moving systems, not blocked systems