The aim of this student project is to investigate the impacts of climate change on hydrological extremes, such as high runoff events, hydrological or agricultural drought. It uses outputs of the AWRA-L hydrological model, which underpins the BoM's Australian Landscape Water Balance website.
This project will use output from state-of-the-art climate simulations of the Last Millennium (850–2005 CE) to explore the long-term variability of an Australian climate driver of the student’s choice. The student will explore the natural variability of that driver to determine its long-term context, and compare with palaeoclimate reconstructions (proxies) where possible.
Climate scientists testing a new mathematical and statistical method that converts projections of future climate outcomes in a warming world into reliable probabilities have found there is a significant chance the Arctic could be ice-free even if world leaders meet the Paris targets of 1.5°C and 2°C.
This observational study of radiative convective equilibrium finds that this equilibrium breaks down in areas of a few thousands kilometres on a side. This has implications cloud model simulations in climate models.
CLEX researchers and colleagues revisit the quasi-equilibrium analytical framework introduced by Comins and McMurtrie (1993) and explore the consequences of specific model assumptions for ecosystem net primary productivity (NPP).
New work published in Nature Communications develops a correction method that ensures the probability of climate extremes in the model simulations are consistent with real-world observations. In addition, it also corrects the rate of the long-term changes and the inter-annual variability so that it is consistent with observations.
New CLEX research finds land cover misclassifications over South East Asia based on remote sensing products have negligible impact on the outcomes of climate model experiments. However, land cover experiments that incorporate uncertainties must use large numbers of simulations to get robust results for rainfall and air temperature.
New research confirms the long-term cooling over Antarctica during the last millennium and the delayed onset of anthropogenic warming are found in simulations that assimilate palaeoclimate data. This is not evident in simulations without data assimilation.
Prof Christian Jakob (Monash University). Climate models have significant errors in precipitation globally, but in particular in the tropics. Most models overestimate annual mean tropical precipitation, with the largest errors occurring over the warm tropical oceans of the Western Pacific, Indian Ocean and Atlantic. In addition to the mean errors, there are significant shortcomings in the rainfall variability in space and time. Given its immediate impact on tropical rainfall, most of the errors are usually attributed to shortcomings in the... View Article
This project will apply state-of-the-art computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations of microscale urban flow such as large eddy simulations to develop a 1-D (multi-layer) model of turbulent flow with detailed parameterisation regarding the role of geometry; surface heating and material; and vegetation.