CLEX researchers found that regions where there is a larger drying trend tend to be more sensitive to land water availability and have more heatwave days. They found that the effect of dry soils before a heatwave varies considerably across Australia.
CLEX Director Andy Pitman highlights the importance of our research at a challenging time in southern and eastern Australia as a combination of drought, fire and hot weather confront communities, and as air quality in some cities reaches dangerous levels.
In an hour-long talk to a business forum, Andy Pitman said: “there is no link between climate change and drought”. Given the audience were not climate scientists, or interested in the physics of the climate, this statement was one word too brief. Andy fully admits he should have said: “there is no direct link between climate change and drought”.
Speakers: Andy Pitman (CLEX), Lisa Alexander (CLEX), Greg Holland (Climate and Energy College), Seth Westra (University of Adelaide), Ryan Crompton (Risk Frontiers)
This release is to advise the community that an ACCESS Oversight Committee has been formed initially comprising Christian Jakob, Rachel Law, Helen Cleugh, Andy Pitman, Tony Hirst, Peter May, David Karoly and Ben Evans. Terms of reference have been agreed to by the group and can be found at the end of this document.
The Centre has had a busy four months with its researchers having an impact nationally and internationally. The Centre has achieved some foundation and enabling research around the delivery of data, and a series of new research discoveries, that will play an important role in climate extremes research for some years. And Centre researchers are once again the winners of some major awards.
This student project will focus on spatially correlated events in Australia that occurred in the past 30 to 40 years. Using observations over this time period the student will catalogue past compound events; assess possible trends in their occurrence; check for preferred spatial correlation patterns; and assess if these were accurately reproduced in reanalysis products (e.g. BARRA, ERA-5 and/or ERA-Interim).
The Postdoctoral Research Associate will work on a new ARC-funded project exploring how vulnerable Australia’s eucalypts are to future droughts. This project will combine data-synthesis, experimental manipulation and modelling to deliver new process-orientated insight into the response of eucalyptus trees to projected changes in the frequency, magnitude and duration of future droughts across Australia.
Speakers: Andy Pitman (CLEX), Lisa Alexander (CLEX), Greg Holland (Climate and Energy College), Seth Westra (University of Adelaide), Ryan Crompton (Risk Frontiers)
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.