During the 2020 La Nina, many areas of Australia received near average to severely below-average rainfall, particularly during November. CLEX researchers found that several compounding factors contributed to the drier-than anticipated spring conditions.
Variability in urban land-use results in microclimatic variability across a city that is not picked up by government weather station networks. Crowdsourced weather stations can fill these gaps.
It has long been suggested in the literature, and discussed casually by meteorologists, that rainfall in Melbourne often occurs as lines of precipitation. However, this had yet to be quantified. CLEX researchers analysed 15 years of radar data from the Australian Radar Archive, using an objective method to identify and track these ‘linear systems’ based on radar reflectivity, size, and shape characteristics.
CLEX researchers have overturned a scientific paradigm that has existed for 50 years. New research published in Nature Geoscience shows the massive convection caused by the ocean just north of Australia, causes a chain reaction that is strong enough to put an almost permanent dent in the powerful winds that circle the Antarctic.
The overarching goal of the Colorado State University Convective CLoud Outflows and UpDrafts Experiment (C3LOUD-Ex) was to enhance our understanding of deep convective storm processes and how they are represented in numerical models. Pivotal to the experiment was a novel “Flying Curtain” strategy.
This research uses Sydney, Australia’s largest city, as a test case for our new configuration of the Weather and Research Forecasting model run at a very high resolution of 800 m with a new urban classification scheme that describes the complexity of Sydney’s built environment.
In this study, CLEX researchers and colleagues showed that the North Atlantic sea-surface temperature response to ENSO is nonlinear with respect to the strength of the sea-surface temperature forcing in the tropical Pacific.
CLEX researchers used data from a wind profiler radar pair at Darwin, Australia, to determine the characteristics of individual up- and downdrafts observed at the site. They found updrafts with 5km vertical heights with extreme rain rates.
Research by Annette Hirsch into heatwaves over Sydney has been turned into a spectacular animation by Drew Whitehouse from NCI Vizlab.
An unusual southern stratospheric warming event amplified the conditions that led to the Black Summer bushfires of 2019/20. CLEX researchers explored how frequently these rare warming events may occur with climate change.