An unusual southern stratospheric warming event amplified the conditions that led to the Black Summer bushfires of 2019/20. CLEX researchers explored how frequently these rare warming events may occur with climate change.
This research around central Pacific El Niños is important for agricultural and water resources planning efforts in the Murray Darling Basin region and may help with seasonal prediction efforts to predict drought‐breaking rain such as occurred in early 2020.
It has been remarkable how much we have achieved in this extraordinarily difficult year. Research coming out of the Teleconnections and Variability program over the past four months has strongly focused on how influences in one part of the world can have direct impacts on another.
Despite the pandemic, the recent few months have seen a range of triumphs with completed PhDs being prominent among them. Our research has revealed the powerful influence of small scale and large scale ocean processes on our current and future climate.
CLEX researchers and colleagues investigated how El Niños may change in the future using paleoclimate data in combination with CMIP5 and CMIP6 model runs.
CLEX researchers and colleagues have highlighted the need for the development of systems to predict marine heatwaves, which are a growing threat to marine ecosystems and industries as the climate changes.
In this project, we will investigate the links between precipitation extremes and the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO), including its signature in El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) impacts, across tropical land regions.
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.
An international team, led by Australian researchers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes (CLEX) and the Institute for Marine and Antarctic (IMAS) studies, have published in Nature Communications the first global assessment of the major drivers of marine heatwaves.
In a world first, CLEX researchers have produced a 400-year-long record of El Nino activity. This gives us an entirely new insight into the behaviour of these high impact events and reveals unprecedented changes over the past 30 years.