Coral bleaching events have been reported over the Great Barrier Reef during La Niña events and the neutral phase of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, when large-scale sea-surface temperatures may be cooler than normal. How does this occur?
The Drought program has had a busy few months engaging with industry, the public, and policymakers in Australia and around the world, while our research continues to break new ground.
The modelling program has now settled in with weekly MOM/COSIMA meetings while working with other research programs on projects that will continue to improve our models and the way we use them in our research. This work has extended to industry and peer network stakeholders.
The Northern Australia Climate Program (NACP) is an innovative drought and climate variability research, development, and extension (RD&E) program to enhance business resilience and build capacity to manage climate risk across the northern Australian red meat industry.
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.
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 and colleagues showed that the North Atlantic sea-surface temperature response to ENSO is nonlinear with respect to the strength of the sea-surface temperature forcing in the tropical Pacific.
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.
El Niño effects are communicated to the Indian Ocean via both large‐scale atmospheric circulation changes over the southern tropical ocean basin and via disturbances to sea‐levels along the coast of Western Australia. CLEX researchers investigated these remote ENSO influences in a state‐of‐the‐art climate model.