Kim Reid offers a useful list of common unspoken knowledge for postgraduate students in the climate sciences. Hopefully, she says, this will save you some time and mistakes in the future.
Different expressions of El Niño do affect interannual variability in the terrestrial carbon cycle. However, the effect over longer timescales is small. This means the changing frequency of these two types of El Niño events may be of little importance in terms of robustly simulating the future terrestrial carbon cycle.
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.
As a La Niña event intensifies in the Pacific, bringing increased rain to parts of Australia and a powerful hurricane season to the Tropical Atlantic, a new book reveals the dynamics and impacts of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the irregular cycle that switches the Pacific Ocean between these cool La Niña and warm El Niño events.
Ocean salinity could be an indicator of major rain events before IOD or ENSO events have peaked. This raises the prospect that long term forecasts for Australia could be improved by analysing sea surface salinity in the Indian and Pacific oceans.