Welcome to the first Weather and Climate Interactions RP report. The new program name is simply a result of rationalising CLEX’s continuing research program under new headings that more clearly delineate the focus of the work we do.
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.
This time last year Kim Reid was planning a Euro-adventure where she would attend a summer school in the Swiss Alps, attend EGU, visit Reading and the Met Office and explore some castles on the side. Now she and her supervisor joke that if case numbers stay low, Kim might be able to visit a university in the same city.
To shed more light on short droughts of the past, CLEX researchers took advantage of a newly released dataset from the Bureau of Meteorology to re-examine the infamous Centennial Drought of 1888. Using the new dataset along with historical station data, they analysed monthly rainfall variability across south eastern Australia throughout 1888.
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.
CLEX researchers and colleagues investigated how El Niños may change in the future using paleoclimate data in combination with CMIP5 and CMIP6 model runs.
A new study by CLEX researchers and colleagues shows that CMIP5 models as a group, when forced by observed sea surface temperatures underestimate, these atmospheric feedbacks on average by 23%. This underestimate can be linked to the wrong location at which climate models simulate the most important tropical circulation, called the Walker circulation.
This study found in CMIP5 models that are able to simulate both types of events, that convective extremes do not always coincide with warm extremes. The disassociation becomes more distinct under greenhouse warming with higher occurrences of convective extremes than warm extremes.
The Climate Variability program has seen an extraordinary amount of activity over the past four months with new arrivals, a clutch of thesis submissions, awards, research voyages and a wealth of research.
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.