Drought is a major risk to Australia with extended periods of drought affecting our social, economic and environmental systems. The newly released report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change contains significant new assessments of the science and future projections of drought.
This project seeks to better understand the changing nature of Australian droughts by synthesising satellite and ground observations in combination with state-of-the-art climate model projections.
An analysis of new climate model projections by Australian researchers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes shows southwestern Australia and parts of southern Australia will see longer and more intense droughts due to a lack of rainfall caused by climate change.
The drought program explains what is unusual about the current drought in Australia and in examining flaws in the Aridity Index explores how drought may change in the future.
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.
This student project will determine the probability of a drought being terminated by an extreme precipitation event to assess the risk of drought-induced flooding. For this the student will assess observations, reanalysis data and results from a large climate model ensemble.
The aim of this student project is to investigate the effect of bias correction and downscaling methods on hydrological projections for Australia.
The aim of this student project is to investigate the impacts of climate change on hydrological extremes, such as high runoff events, hydrological or agricultural drought. It uses outputs of the AWRA-L hydrological model, which underpins the BoM's Australian Landscape Water Balance website.
The Drought program has been strongly focused on evaluating and improving climate models, and developing a drought database for documenting drought and for benchmarking model performance.
This project will use satellite and flux tower observations to characterise the response of Australian ecosystems to water stress. These data will then be used to evaluate how well the Australian climate model predicts droughts. The successful candidate will obtain skills in programming and analysis of spatial datasets and model outputs.