It is hoped this proposed synthesis of two ENSO structures, their interaction with each other and how they respond to external forcing, will be the catalyst for future research and practical applications for forecasting and determining the impacts of present and future ENSO events.
This study highlights the importance of simulating global and regional warming responses correctly, to enable more accurate estimates of how the occurrence probability of climate extremes may change in a warming climate.
The CLEX node at Monash is offering several PhD scholarships on a competitive basis. The scholarships may cover fees and living expenses for 3 years. Generous travel support for PhD students to visit our international partners exists. Some projects may involve other universities, the CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology, or one of our international partners.
Convective parameterizations are widely believed to be essential for realistic simulations of the atmosphere, but are crude in today's weather and climate models. CLEX researchers, report on what happens when a number of these models are run with these schemes simply turned off.
This study evaluated GCMs for common drought metrics during the past 55 years. It found different models can produce very different simulations of drought, depending on the type of drought and metric analysed. The study points to a need to improve GCMs for droughts to reduce uncertainties in future projections.
This PhD project will use climate model simulations to examine how sensitive attribution assessments of high-impact heatwaves to human emissions of carbon dioxide are to the representation of key physical processes.
CLEX researchers writing in Nature Climate Change suggest a paradigm shift in how climate scientists approach climate change impact assessments. They suggest examining the system or potential catastrophe first instead of making the starting point a climate scenario.
New research published in Nature Geoscience has found that climate engineering that modifies the properties of the land surface in highly populated areas and agricultural areas over North America, Europe and Asia could reduce extreme temperatures there by up to 2-3°C.
Understanding which plant species can recover from drought, under what conditions and the processes involved, will help researchers predict plant mortality in response to global climate change. In response to drought, some species die because of embolism-induced hydraulic failure, while others recover, following rehydration. This research focuses on structures and processes that might allow some plants to recover from drought stress via embolism reversal.
This study explored the key sources of uncertainty when scaling leaf-level understanding of water-use efficiency to ecosystem scales. The results provide key insights into interpreting (ecosystem-scale) eddy-covariance derived water-use efficiency in an ecophysiological context.