I imagine very few of us will have particularly fond memories of 2020 when we look back on it in a few years. Yet at the same time it’s been a year that has provided opportunities for introspection and reassessment of many aspects of our working lives and how work and life interact.
Back in early February 2020 we shortlisted a small handful of workshop venues just outside Melbourne and settled on Ballarat for the 2020 CLEX workshop. Little did we know then how the rest of the year would play out. By mid-year hopes of an in-person workshop for 2020 had to be abandoned.
Version 1 of the Aus400 dataset has been released for community use. This dataset is from a simulation using a regional version (v11.4) of the Met Office unified model (the atmosphere component of The Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator, ACCESS) with 400m grid spacing over all of Australia.
It has been remarkable how much we have achieved in this extraordinarily difficult year. Research coming out of the Teleconnections and Variability program over the past four months has strongly focused on how influences in one part of the world can have direct impacts on another.
The past four months have seen a lot of activity with the release of Weathex 2.0, a short video Q&ARC introducing some of our researchers, two combined Centre of Excellence media workshops, and a pilot interview program featuring Christian Jakob that explored the challenges of climate science.
A major component of the research in the Drought program over the past four months has focused on the interface between real-world data and climate models. The aim of much of this research has been to improve how land surface models represent some of the key processes that influence the length, and severity of drought.
In September 2020, IAG and NCAR released a report Severe Weather in a Changing Climate (second edition), which incorporated research findings from numerous CLEX researchers. CLEX feedback also led to the incorporation of a new section on connected extremes in this report, highlighting the value of research into weather extremes.
With the drama and instability of 2020, many of our ECRs have faced unprecedented challenges including loneliness, homesickness and the mounting uncertainties for their future careers. That latter concern may be why the majority of ECRs wanted this year's virtual ECR workshop to focus on the Future in academia and planning your research career.
It has been remarkable how much we have achieved in this extraordinarily difficult year. Research coming out of the Teleconnections and Variability program over the past four months has strongly focused on how influences in one part of the world can have direct impacts on another.
The past four months have seen the Heatwaves and Cold Air Outbreaks research program focus very much on improving our capacity to understand and help others in research and industry get an insight into the impact of extreme heat events.