During the 2020 La Nina, many areas of Australia received near average to severely below-average rainfall, particularly during November. CLEX researchers found that several compounding factors contributed to the drier-than anticipated spring conditions.
This time last year Kim Reid was planning a Euro-adventure where she would attend a summer school in the Swiss Alps, attend EGU, visit Reading and the Met Office and explore some castles on the side. Now she and her supervisor joke that if case numbers stay low, Kim might be able to visit a university in the same city.
Back in early February 2020 we shortlisted a small handful of workshop venues just outside Melbourne and settled on Ballarat for the 2020 CLEX workshop. Little did we know then how the rest of the year would play out. By mid-year hopes of an in-person workshop for 2020 had to be abandoned.
The past four months have seen a lot of activity with the release of Weathex 2.0, a short video Q&ARC introducing some of our researchers, two combined Centre of Excellence media workshops, and a pilot interview program featuring Christian Jakob that explored the challenges of climate science.
With the drama and instability of 2020, many of our ECRs have faced unprecedented challenges including loneliness, homesickness and the mounting uncertainties for their future careers. That latter concern may be why the majority of ECRs wanted this year's virtual ECR workshop to focus on the Future in academia and planning your research career.
It has been an unprecedented year in academia in 2020, a year where many people have been doing it tough in particular those of you in Victoria. The impact of COVID will take a long time to be fully realized of course, with impacts on our students, researchers, administration and technical teams that we could not anticipate.
CLEX researchers and colleagues from the University of the Balearic Islands explored what was most responsible for the coastal damage caused by Storm Gloria in 2020. The storm killed 13 people and left a damage bill in excess of $200m.
Kim Reid had a very fruitful conference at AMOS 2020, but she also had two panic attacks. Here she talks about living with these attacks and how someone in a similar situation can navigate and still get plenty of benefits from crowded conferences.