The new WeatheX mobile app takes crowd-sourced observations of wind, hail, flooding and tornadoes. The information gathered from these citizen scientists then goes through a manual quality control process and is stored in a database.
A range of international workshops, a new citizen science app and some significant research has made the past four months a busy time for the Extreme Rainfall research program.
Severe thunderstorms across Queensland on Sunday, October 21, provided the first opportunity for citizen scientists to report severe weather using the WeatheX app.
Allen Huang (University of Wisconsin) Overview of SSEC/CIMSS research and development in support of NOAA and empowering JPSS/GOES global users
The Extreme Rainfall Research Program of the Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes (CLEX) held a workshop on October 4 at the University of New South Wales (Sydney). There were 30 participants representing the CLEX nodes, Bureau of Meteorology, CSIRO, NSW Office of Environment and Heritage and National Centre for Atmospheric Research.
This project provides an exciting opportunity to develop the longest homogenised daily climate record for Perth using newly digitised observations beginning in 1830. The project will involve working with BoM staff to conduct state-of-the-art quality control measures on the new historical observations to allow a reliable, long-term analysis of extremes and their possible dynamical causes.
This project will investigate the lifecycle of hail storms through the application of a storm-tracking algorithm. Characteristics such as storm size, velocity, and intensity will be examined for severe hail storms and compared to those for non-severe storms.
The associations between rainfall variability, ENSO and temperature appeared to be stationary early in the record, but there was a hint that there was some evidence of a shift in the late 1990s. Has that shift continued? Alternatively, have the rainfall variance characteristics returned to what was observed earlier in the record? This project will use the latest observed datasets to explore these questions.
The ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes' Heatwave Research Program is holding a full day meeting to explore current research and the future direction of the program.
As the end of his masters degree approaches, Ewan Short is at a career crossroads. He studied meteorology, and his main choice is whether to pursue a career as an operational forecaster with the Bureau of Meteorology, or do a PhD. An internship with the Bureau of Meteorology was a step on the way to making that decision.