Onboard the RV Investigator as part of a scientific voyage over Christmas and new year, Rob Warren encountered a spectacular storm and performed research that will continue to improve Australia's radar network.
A lot has happened over the past few months with the publication of high-profile and challenging research and the continuing growth, development and recognition for the RP4 team.
The drought may have finally eased over much of Australia, but it has resulted in a range of research that still continues. This research has opened new insights into how we understand the lifecycle of droughts in Australia. At the same time, continuing analyses of Australian models has produced improved configurations and even led to a new modelling framework for urban centres.
The Extreme Rainfall team took on some key observational challenges for precipitation research and then used some of this data to test our models. There was also a raft of individual achievements to add a little light in this difficult time.
Between bushfires, droughts and new research, CLEX had a strong few months before COVID-19 saw Australia's coverage of climate issues drop by 61%. We have also found a great new video app perfect for workshops and added an outstanding blog pos to our website.
The Knowledge Brokerage Team had a very successful outing as part of AMOS with its involvement in the Climate Across the Curriculum workshop. Lesson plans are now in train working with teachers and other experts.
CMS with the Bureau of Meteorology has set up at atmospheric simulation down to 400m over Australia. Meanwhile porting to Gadi continues and training has changed to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic.
It goes without saying that we find ourselves in challenging and uncertain times. One silver lining is that CLEX enters this period of change as a centre with considerable experience in remote communication and developing supportive networks. This is a time to use those networks to support each other.
Scott Wales (CLEX CMS) talks about analysing a large 3TB climate dataset in a Jupyter notebook.
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.