AMOS awards, international visitors, cross program research with the drought team, and multiple papers have made it a busy time for the Heatwaves and Cold Air Outbreaks Research Program.
New students, an OA for Andy Pitman and some key work on evaporation, the impacts of mesophyll conductance on plant growth, a new algorithm for photosynthesis and future projections of drought made for a strong start to 2019.
A successful workshop on the science of multi-year drought was recently held at Monash University in Melbourne, where 50 experts from Australia, and small number of experts from the UK and the US, met to discuss what we know about the science of these droughts in Australia.
CLEX researchers evaluate the performance of CORDEX simulations over Australia against gridded observations of temperature and precipitation.
This research shows accounting for mesophyll conductance in climate models may have important implications for carbon and water fluxes in boreal regions.
This work examines how climate projections are affected by using different subsets of available climate models. The researchers find several variables need to be optimised independently to get the best results.
Weather and climate extremes occur on a wide range of time and space scales. Weather extremes occur on shorter timescales and are regionally or locally specific while climate extremes tend to be on longer timescales and can impact a region through to the whole globe. This note provides a statement on what we know about how weather and climate extremes might change in the future.
New data assimilation method leads to large improvements in forecast accuracy when satellite observations of electromagnetic radiation emanating from the Earth were used to inform the data assimilation scheme.
Calibration errors in the widely used Global Inventory Monitoring and Modeling System Version 3 NDVI (GIMMSv3.0g) dataset caused significant errors in the trends over some of Australia’s dryland regions. Though identified over Australia, the problematic calibration in the GIMMSv3.0g dataset may have effected dryland NDVI values globally. These errors have been addressed in the updated GIMMSv3.1g which is strongly recommended for use in future studies.
Computer models used to simulate global climate agree the climate will warm in response to increasing atmospheric greenhouse gases. However, a recent paper by Bador et al. (2018)1 includes results that highlight our uncertainty about exactly how extremely wet conditions will change in Australia. Further development of Australia’s national climate model, ACCESS, may help reduce this uncertainty.