There have been some noticeably positive developments over the past four months. The website has been transferred to a faster server, we have had a very successful combined CoE media workshop, we launched WeatheX and are moving towards starting a new Instagram account.
PhD student Jess Hargreaves along with chief investigator Nerilie Abram travelled to Christmas Island to retrieve coral cores that contained more than 200-years worth of detail on sea-levels and rainfall.
As the year draws to a close and we pause to look back over 2018, it’s not surprising that with the ending of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science (ARCCSS) on June 30 and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes (CLEX) building up a head of steam after its first full year, we have packed a lot into the past 12 months.
Chief Operating Officer, Stephen Gray, looks back on the annual workshop, discusses the new database to replace Clever and highlights the hump-day tips that have been developed by the Culture and Diversity committee.
The Earth Systems and Climate Change Hub is now reaching middle age (but no midlife crisis in sight). Since its inception in 2015, the Hub has worked to build a collaborative community among its partner organisations; the Bureau of Meteorology, CSIRO and Australian universities including the University of NSW, ANU, Monash University, the University of Melbourne and the University of Tasmania (all involved in CLEX).
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.
Under future global warming, models shows increases in the wettest day of the season or year exceeds the range of changes explained by natural variability in most land areas.
CLEX now has a Knowledge Brokerage Team headed up by Ian Macadam. Ian has been working hard to reach out to some of the Centre’s key stakeholders in government and business to better understand what they need in the way of information from our scientists.
The Heatwaves and Cold Air Outbreaks Research program has been very active, producing a considerable number of papers over the past four months.