Indian Ocean causes drought and heatwaves in South America
Indian Ocean convection caused a powerful planetary wave that led to a drought in South America and a marine heatwave in the South Atlantic that lasted for months.
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Category: RP2 Heatwaves and cold outbreaks
Distant processes influence marine heatwaves around the world
An international team, led by Australian researchers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes (CLEX) and the Institute for Marine and Antarctic (IMAS) studies, have published in Nature Communications the first global assessment of the major drivers of marine heatwaves.
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Research brief: Is the pattern of Earth’s warming going to change and why?
New study highlights local warming is expected to accelerate beyond the global average in mid latitude regions, especially in summer. Over oceans the rise will be below global average warming.
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Research brief: Towards reliable extreme weather and climate event attribution
New work published in Nature Communications develops a correction method that ensures the probability of climate extremes in the model simulations are consistent with real-world observations. In addition, it also corrects the rate of the long-term changes and the inter-annual variability so that it is consistent with observations.
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Climate extremes explain 18%-43% of global crop yield variations
CLEX researchers and colleagues from Australia, Germany and the US have quantified the effect of climate extremes, such as droughts or heatwaves, on the yield variability of staple crops around
the world. Overall, year-to-year changes in climate factors during the growing season of maize, rice, soy and spring wheat accounted for 20%-49% of yield fluctuations, according to research published in Environmental Research Letters.
Research brief: Testing CORDEX for future climate projections
CLEX researchers evaluate the performance of CORDEX simulations over Australia against gridded observations of temperature and precipitation.
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Marine heatwaves a clear and present threat to our oceans
The increase in frequency and intensity of ocean heatwaves over the past 30 years has had profound impacts on certain marine ecosystems and significantly impacted the industries that depend on them. According to new research in Nature Climate Change, marine heatwaves are now a clear and present threat to global biodiversity.
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Research brief: Categorising and naming marine heatwaves
This paper proposes a standard categorisation and naming framework for marine heatwaves that works in a similar way to schemes used for tropical cyclones or earthquakes.
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Research brief: Calibration in the GIMMSv3.0g dataset may have affected dryland NDVI values globally
Calibration errors in the widely used Global Inventory Monitoring and Modeling System Version 3 NDVI (GIMMSv3.0g) dataset caused significant errors in the trends over some of Australia’s dryland regions. Though identified over Australia, the problematic calibration in the GIMMSv3.0g dataset may have effected dryland NDVI values globally. These errors have been addressed in the updated GIMMSv3.1g which is strongly recommended for use in future studies.
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Research brief: How to select the best models to predict future warming
This study illustrates how future uncertainty of climate models in predicting hot extremes is controlled by two factors, both related to amplification of hot extremes through land-atmosphere interactions
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Research brief: Selecting the correct model is more than a “beauty contest”
The scientific community is moving away from “beauty contest” thinking where models are accepted or rejected on the basis of how well they simulate particular aspects of the present or past, toward a smarter approach that seeks to understand and exploit how present and future predictions are related as well as how different models are related.
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Research brief: Australian climate policy inaction threatens lives
Overall, the inaugural Australian Countdown finds that Australia is vulnerable to the impacts of climate change on health, and that policy inaction in this regard threatens Australian lives.
In a number of respects, Australia has gone backwards and now lags behind other high income countries such as Germany and the United Kingdom. Examples include the persistence of a very high carbon-intensive energy system in Australia, and a slow transition to renewables and low-carbon electricity generation.
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Research Briefs
Research brief: How heat in the Indian Ocean moves between the ocean and atmosphere
Research brief: Wind changes over the Southern Ocean impact its capacity to take up carbon and heat
Research brief: Future directions for the Indian Ocean Observing System
Research brief: Tagged seals unlock secrets of eddy driven transport in Antarctica