The Weather and Climate Interactions Research Program is now bedded down, and work is beginning apace. We have also started to see our researchers bring their expertise to a range of stakeholders, peer networks, and the broader community.
In this study, CLEX researchers used aircraft observations from twenty flights during three Austral winters to study the microphysical and reflective properties of shallow convective clouds over the mid-latitude Southern Ocean.
Clemente Lopez-Bravo has created two datasets – L1 and L2 – of satellite observations of cloud properties across Australia and the Maritime Continent. The datasets, which have been released for the scientific community, are at a 2km spatial resolution at hourly intervals and cover five Austral summers in the period from November 2015 to March 2020.
In this work CLEX researchers aim to understand a few popular ways to parameterize convection. They extracted one vertical column from five different GCMs and lightly tickled (perturbed) it and then observed the responses.
While the data from Himiwari-8 provides very useful data on clouds at relatively high resolution, researchers need to know if it produced any biases, particularly around cloud-top height and cloud-top temperature, whose roles are critical in shaping Earth’s climate. CLEX researchers and Australian colleagues compared the Himawari-8 data for both of these measures with existing datasets.
This project analyzes satellite images and other observational data to study two-way interactions between convection and tropospheric waves. In particular, it investigates how these interactions influence patterns of convection and clouds. Numerical experiments in the form of high-resolution simulations are designed to support the results.
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.
Haoran Wang (University of Tasmania). Honours seminar: Properties of cloud and radiation environment across the Southern Ocean
In 2016, Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes researchers and colleagues measured Southern Ocean INPs for the first time in over four decades. The numbers of these particles were extremely low compared to other oceans and 100 times lower than the previous Southern Ocean measurement program conducted in the 1970s.
In this project, we seek to utilise 40 years of observations of water vapour profiles from the global radiosonde network to improve our process level understanding of water vapour mixing. The applicant is expected to know the basics of atmospheric physics and statistics. Some knowledge of data processing tools will be an advantage.