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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.