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.
The Heatwaves and Cold Air Outbreaks Research program has been very active, producing a considerable number of papers over the past four months.
It has been a very active time for the Climate Variability and Teleconnections Research Program in terms of research and engagement activities right across the team, including two expeditions - one drilling coral cores in the tropics and another going south to the Antarctic Circumpolar Current.
The Drought program has been strongly focused on evaluating and improving climate models, and developing a drought database for documenting drought and for benchmarking model performance.
CLEX PhD student Earl Duran presented his work on the South Australian Current System at ACOMO 2018 held this year at the Shine Dome, Canberra, ACT.