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Research brief: Revisiting the 1888 Centennial Drought
To shed more light on short droughts of the past, CLEX researchers took advantage of a newly released dataset from the Bureau of Meteorology to re-examine the infamous Centennial Drought of 1888. Using the new dataset along with historical station data, they analysed monthly rainfall variability across south eastern Australia throughout 1888.
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Research brief: The interaction of ocean basins may improve long-term climate predictions
An international team of authors led by NCAR scientist and CLEX PI Jerry Meehl, along with CLEX CIs and AIs, propose that the Pacific and Atlantic ocean basins are mutually interactive, with each basin influencing and responding to processes in the other basin.
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Research brief: Indian Ocean warming modulates global atmospheric circulation trends
Using atmospheric model experiments, researchers have shown that the warming of the tropical Indian Ocean relative to the other two tropical ocean basins can effectively control Walker Circulation changes in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans and influence climate far beyond the Indian Ocean region.
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Research brief: Land surface models struggle to reproduce evaporative processes
This paper details a new approach to evaluating the performance of land surface models, the component of climate and weather models that simulates land surface processes. It focuses on the cycle of solar radiation during daylight hours and how the energy from the sun is exchanged between the land surface and lower atmosphere.
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Research brief: Sea ice cover independently validates air temperature over Antarctic
This study is based the well-established fact that sea ice cover is very closely related to surface air temperature, so that we can use trends in Antarctic sea ice as an independent validation for the reanalysis trends.
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Research brief: How a glacier tongue break influenced phytoplankton blooms in Antarctica
In this paper, the researchers investigated how a major glacier tongue break in the Mertz polynya in Antarctica impacted phytoplankton blooms. Larger phytoplankton blooms increase the amount of carbon that can be stored in the deep ocean.
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Research brief: How dryness affects plant hydraulics in different systems
In this paper, the researchers investigated how dryness, represented by the aridity index, affects the inter-annual variability of ecosystem iso/anisohydricity at the regional scale, estimated using satellite microwave vegetation optical depth observations.
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Research brief: Hemispheric index fails to capture Variations in winds around Antarctica
By grouping weather systems by similar patterns rather than averaging conditions over months, seasons or years, CLEX researchers found that between Australia and Antarctica, the ‘doughnut’ structure of SAM is split into multiple ‘flavours’ and is more likely to have ‘bite marks’ out of it than be a perfect ring.
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Research brief: Uncertainty of future wheat yield varies with location
CLEX researchers and colleagues examined the contribution to uncertainty in simulated future changes in crop yields using the change-factor method and an additional, more sophisticated, statistical downscaling method of generating realistic future climate data from climate model output.
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Research brief: New protocol aims to improve the quality and communication of extreme event attribution
This paper aims to catalogue the steps the authors have found make up a successful framework for event attribution analyses. The hope is that this paper will be useful for those considering how to undertake such work themselves and to highlight some of the potential issues and pitfalls that can arise along the way.
