Models used to project future climate change, and impacts of climate change on plants and ecosystems, currently assume that mature forests will continue to absorb carbon over and above their current levels, acting as carbon sinks. The findings from this research suggest that those sinks may in actual fact be weaker or absent for forests on low-nutrient soils.
Read More
This study presents a method for combining multiple observational datasets of the energy and water budgets at the land surface from different sources into a single hybrid dataset that conserves energy and mass.
Read More
In this study, CLEX researchers and colleagues analysed the magnitude and sensitivity of vegetation responses to the Millennium Drought with satellite-derived information.
Read More
In this study, CLEX researchers and colleagues tested the ability of 10 terrestrial biosphere models to reproduce observed sensitivity of ecosystem productivity to rainfall changes (rainfall exclusion/irrigation) at ten sites across the globe.
Read More
New research shows, contrary to expectation, the inter-annual variance in evapotranspiration is much smaller than for precipitation, runoff and soil storage. Accounting for hydrologic covariances explains why it is possible for variability in the principal sink (e.g., streamflow) to exceed variability in the source (precipitation).
Read More
In this study of drought and rainfall over the Murray Darling Basin, CLEX authors find that the length of time between La Niñas and negative-IODs is an important indicator of the likelihood of drought for this region.
Read More
This work describes a new cross-scale modelling framework for urban environments and applies it to calculate how electricity and gas demand will change under future climate change and air conditioner (AC) ownership scenarios.
Read More
CLEX researchers evaluated an updated version of CABLE climate model within a WRF physics ensemble over the CORDEX AustralAsia domain. Results were strongly dependent on the region of interest.
Read More
CLEX researchers and colleagues found the Aridity Index was too simplistic to capture the many aspects that define landscape aridity, including the amount of rainfall, water resources and vegetation productivity, and is a poor indicator of future aridity changes.
Read More
With projected increases in temperature in the future, the amount of water vapour that can be held at saturation – before it condenses into clouds, dew or water film – increases exponentially. As this deficit increases plants tend to close their stomata, which reduces water fluxes into the boundary layer. Do models currently capture the observed leaf-level response to increasing vapour pressure deficit? What about at very high levels of this deficit?
Read More
