The seven-year funding for Centres of Excellence ostensibly supports focused research across existing scientific communities but, as the Consortium for Ocean-Sea Ice Modelling in Australia (COSIMA) shows, it can also help create entirely new scientific communities in a specific research area.
The Australian FLUXNET data provide perhaps the world’s most valuable observations for building and evaluating the land models needed for projecting future droughts and heatwaves.
Urban Climate and Energy Model (UCLEM) is a new climate model focused on Australian conditions that integrates energy use and human behaviour to generate accurate representations of urban climates.
New research clearly demonstrates the potential to predict long-term LAI using simple ecohydrological theory. This approach could potentially be incorporated into existing terrestrial biosphere models and help improve predictions of LAI.