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.
Mathilde Ritman describes her journey as a second-year undergraduate student into a CLEX research project with Linden Ashcroft. It led to a publication, a massive learning curve in coding, stints with the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO, and opened a path to a career in climate science.
It has long been suggested in the literature, and discussed casually by meteorologists, that rainfall in Melbourne often occurs as lines of precipitation. However, this had yet to be quantified. CLEX researchers analysed 15 years of radar data from the Australian Radar Archive, using an objective method to identify and track these ‘linear systems’ based on radar reflectivity, size, and shape characteristics.
Hydrological impact studies analyse the effects of climate change on hydrological variables, such as changes in soil moisture, streamflow or hydrological extremes. This project aims to investigate the realised added value effect of model bias correction and downscaling methods on hydrological projections for Australia.
This project will explore the use of supervised and unsupervised statistical learning methods (such as neural networks, random forest, clustering) to understand the impact of climate change on hydrological extremes and/or to simulate downstream impacts on affected sectors, such as agriculture, energy, transport, water resources management.
The aim of this project is to investigate the effect of compound hot and dry events on agricultural production in Australia, and to assess the predictability of yield losses due to compound events using seasonal climate and hydrological forecasts. The outcome of the project may inform the development of seasonal forecasts of hydro-climatic risk indicators for agricultural production in Australia.
Steven's investigation into drought started as a six-week project and ended up becoming two years of research, conference presentations and more – and that was before he even graduated.
Sopia Lestari (CLEX/University of Melbourne). Understanding variability of rainfall extremes in Jakarta and surrounding regions. Location: Online (Teams). Please email sig-seminars-admin@bom.gov.au for details of Microsoft Teams link to join.
In this report CMS welcomes Annette Hirsch to the team, alerts users to retracted ERA5 data, continues work on ACCESS-ESM1.5, and looks at changes to NCI processes, and CLEX data management practices and training.
To shed more light on short droughts of the past, CLEX researchers took advantage of a newly released dataset from the Bureau of Meteorology to re-examine the infamous Centennial Drought of 1888. Using the new dataset along with historical station data, they analysed monthly rainfall variability across south eastern Australia throughout 1888.