As part of CLEX’s engagement with the agricultural sector, Chief Investigators Ailie Gallant and Andrea Taschetto presented an overview of some of the Centre’s relevant research interests to the monthly meeting of the Forewarned is Forearmed Community of Practice (FWFACoP) group in June 2021.
Understanding what causes droughts and what brings about their conclusion is key work in a dry continent like Australia. Often, we use computer models and modern observations to reach our conclusions but sometimes the clues to these questions can be uncovered in the past.
Until now, flash drought research has been on the regional scale and has been limited to observations and reanalyses. CLEX researchers have been the first to examine flash drought in climate models.
This paper used statistical techniques to investigate changes in extreme climate events that currently occur, on average, only once every 20 years. These techniques are applied to data related to heat, rainfall, drought and conditions conducive to bushfires and thunderstorms from detailed climate modelling commissioned by NSW and ACT Governments.
A major component of the research in the Drought program over the past four months has focused on the interface between real-world data and climate models. The aim of much of this research has been to improve how land surface models represent some of the key processes that influence the length, and severity of drought.
In this paper, the researchers investigated how dryness, represented by the aridity index, affects the inter-annual variability of ecosystem iso/anisohydricity at the regional scale, estimated using satellite microwave vegetation optical depth observations.
CLEX researchers examined the uncertainties of the input data of three commonly used drought indices, with the data coming from different sources, including observations and reanalysis. The ability of these indices to detect drought was assessed against soil moisture from multiple global land surface models.
The Drought program farewells Michael Roderick who has retired and looks over an extensive range of research that has been carried out despite the global pandemic. Some significant model improvements, new datasets and deeper insights into past and future climates show the depth of the research effort.
CLEX researchers investigate the mysterious annual mid-summer drought that occurs in Central America and Mexico, and find a range of regional influences that alter its timing and characteristics.
This project seeks to better understand the changing nature of Australian droughts by synthesising satellite and ground observations in combination with state-of-the-art climate model projections.