Category: RP3 Drought
Research brief: More accurate prediction of tree mortality during droughts
CLEX researchers working with colleagues from the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment revealed a method to predict the probability of tree mortality during droughts.
Read More
Research brief: Nutrient availability framework accurately forecasts plant growth from CO2 fertilisation effect
CLEX researchers and colleagues revisit the quasi-equilibrium analytical framework introduced by Comins and McMurtrie (1993) and explore the consequences of specific model assumptions for ecosystem net primary productivity (NPP).
Read More
Research brief: Misclassification in climate models of land cover over East Asia has little impact on results
New CLEX research finds land cover misclassifications over South East Asia based on remote sensing products have negligible impact on the outcomes of climate model experiments. However, land cover experiments that incorporate uncertainties must use large numbers of simulations to get robust results for rainfall and air temperature.
Read More
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: Do wet soils affect rainfall?
How wet the soil is before a storm can determine the amount of rain that falls. This research also produced some interesting findings for rainfall in Australia.
Read More
Research brief: New formula supersedes Priestley-Taylor equation for evaporation
New research suggests that the concept of maximum evaporation reported here is a natural attribute of an extensive wet evaporating surface. This provides a fundamental new insight as to how radiation, evaporation and temperature are interlinked.
Read More
Research brief: Improving climate model estimates of photosynthesis response to elevated CO2
This research shows accounting for mesophyll conductance in climate models may have important implications for carbon and water fluxes in boreal regions.
Read More
Research brief: How climate projections change with different model subsets
This work examines how climate projections are affected by using different subsets of available climate models. The researchers find several variables need to be optimised independently to get the best results.
Read More
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.
Read More
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
Read More
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.
Research brief: New global runoff estimates help define past energy and water budgets
Together with a recent paper estimating evaporation and transpiration from the land surface, this paper brings the community a step closer to observationally constrained estimates of the historical land surface energy and water budgets
Read More
Download the WeatheX App
