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.
Understanding what causes droughts and what brings about their conclusion is key work in a dry continent like Australia. Often, we use computer models and modern observations to reach our conclusions but sometimes the clues to these questions can be uncovered in the past.
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.
This project aims to learn more about the 1888 Centennial Drought using palaeoclimate information, documentary records, station based data and gridded datasets.