There have been some noticeably positive developments over the past four months. The website has been transferred to a faster server, we have had a very successful combined CoE media workshop, we launched WeatheX and are moving towards starting a new Instagram account.
Graduate Director Melissa Hart describes the Homeward Bound training experience that took her to Antarctica and encourages other women in STEMM to take part.
PhD student Jess Hargreaves along with chief investigator Nerilie Abram travelled to Christmas Island to retrieve coral cores that contained more than 200-years worth of detail on sea-levels and rainfall.
This year’s Centre of Excellence workshop at Wollongong, structured by a committee of Michael Reeder, Andy Hogg and Amelie Meyer, thoroughly broke with tradition and introduced some intriguing innovations.
Chief Operating Officer, Stephen Gray, looks back on the annual workshop, discusses the new database to replace Clever and highlights the hump-day tips that have been developed by the Culture and Diversity committee.
The Earth Systems and Climate Change Hub is now reaching middle age (but no midlife crisis in sight). Since its inception in 2015, the Hub has worked to build a collaborative community among its partner organisations; the Bureau of Meteorology, CSIRO and Australian universities including the University of NSW, ANU, Monash University, the University of Melbourne and the University of Tasmania (all involved in CLEX).
This year ends on a high note with the announcement of a remarkable number of individual successes as we enter awards season, an impressive range of fundamental research that sets future directions for the Centre, a new citizen science weather app, and the hiring of a Knowledge Broker. We also hosted our annual workshop in Wollongong, which involved over 150 researchers and students.
The new WeatheX mobile app takes crowd-sourced observations of wind, hail, flooding and tornadoes. The information gathered from these citizen scientists then goes through a manual quality control process and is stored in a database.
A range of international workshops, a new citizen science app and some significant research has made the past four months a busy time for the Extreme Rainfall research program.
CLEX now has a Knowledge Brokerage Team headed up by Ian Macadam. Ian has been working hard to reach out to some of the Centre’s key stakeholders in government and business to better understand what they need in the way of information from our scientists.