This research brief examines how research from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes informed the IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Land.
In an hour-long talk to a business forum, Andy Pitman said: “there is no link between climate change and drought”. Given the audience were not climate scientists, or interested in the physics of the climate, this statement was one word too brief.
The ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes has contributed to a new scientific study that reveals that extremely hot and cold temperatures, drought and heavy rainfall strongly affect the year-to-year variation in the total global yield of four important crops.
Large areas of northern Queensland experienced extreme rainfall and severe flooding in late January and February 2019. This briefing note examines the impacts and some of the likely causes of the event.
Weather and climate extremes occur on a wide range of time and space scales. Weather extremes occur on shorter timescales and are regionally or locally specific while climate extremes tend to be on longer timescales and can impact a region through to the whole globe.
Computer models used to simulate global climate agree the climate will warm in response to increasing atmospheric greenhouse gases. However, a recent paper by Bador et al. (2018)1 includes results that highlight our uncertainty about exactly how extremely wet conditions will change in Australia.
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.
