Category: Research briefs
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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Research brief: Rescuing centuries-old meteorological measurements
This paper documents the efforts of the international weather data rescue initiative ACRE, the International Surface Temperature Initiative and researchers that took part in workshops held in Bern, Switzerland, in June 2018 to rescue and digitize meteorological measurements taken prior to 1850 from around the world.
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Research brief: Gravity waves cause unusual turbulence
This research uses commercial aircraft data and high-resolution simulations to study a case in 2005 over the United States where severe turbulence was encountered about 50km away from a large mesoscale convective system. Of relevance, current aviation turbulence avoidance guidelines recommend avoiding storms by 32 km (20 miles).
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Research brief: How heat in the Indian Ocean moves between the ocean and atmosphere
In this study, CLEX researchers use two years of measurements from a flux mooring combined with satellite data and model outputs to understand the seasonal changes in air‐sea fluxes and the role of ocean currents in controlling ocean surface temperatures in the southeast Indian Ocean.
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Research brief: Wind changes over the Southern Ocean impact its capacity to take up carbon and heat
CLEX researchers and colleagues examined the movement of surface water into the depths of the ocean in response to these wind changes using a global ocean model.
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Research brief: Future directions for the Indian Ocean Observing System
This paper reviews the societal and scientific motivations, current status, and future directions of IndOOS, while also discussing the need for enhanced observations in priority areas.
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Research brief: Tagged seals unlock secrets of eddy driven transport in Antarctica
Observations from Antarctic seals fitted with scientific instruments have revealed how eddy driven transport may be driving the melting of ice shelves, with consequent impacts on sea-level rise.
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Research brief: Climate model projections of Philippines typhoon activity
The Philippines is one of the most exposed countries in the world to tropical cyclones. In order to provide information to help the country build resilience and plan for a future under a warmer climate, researchers built on previous research to investigate implications of future climate change on tropical cyclone activity in the Philippines.
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