Awards:

  • Graham Farquhar, an Associate Investigator was named Senior Australian of the Year for 2018.


Model developments

In a major achievement, a version of the Australian community land model is now running in the ACCESS modelling system. This version includes the science advances led by Mark Decker around hydrology and soil evaporation, and the science advances led by Martin de Kauwe and Jatin Kala. It also includes major bug fixes identified by collaborators in the UK, and by colleagues in CSIRO. For the first time, we have a version of the Australian community land model coupled with an up to date version of the UK Meteorological Office’s atmosphere model (and used in experimental versions of the Australian community climate and Earth System Simulator (ACCESS) model. Experiments are currently being designed to examine how the various advances effect the simulation of drought in ACCESS. This will achieve one of the major goals in the first year of CLEX.

Visitors

We hosted Partner Investigator Martin Best from the UK Meteorological Office for a week. Extensive discussions were had around collaborative approaches to the land surface with CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology, and more broadly on drought with other Centre researchers. Major progress was made on how to approach the integration of the Australian community land model into the code repository of the UK Meteorological Office which should have very long term benefits for the national climate modelling initiative.

We also hosted Simone Fatichi from partner organization ETH Zurich. We had discussions around modelling asymmetric responses to rainfall and Simone gave a talk at UNSW. 

 

New arrivals / Farewells

Manon Sabot has started her PhD within the Centre. She is working on how water flows through the plants with the goal of improving the representation of hydraulics, informed by plant physiology. Manon is supervised by Martin de Kauwe and Andy Pitman.

 

Papers