Topography plays a key role in the development of extreme rainfall events in Jakarta, Indonesia. The IOD and MJO play a greater role in these extremes than ENSO.
An improved Tropical Pacific Observing System that is responsive to user needs will provide for better understanding and prediction of the climate system, which will reduce climate uncertainty for society.
The moored current meter observations in the Maluku Channel of the Indonesian seas suggest that upwelling equatorial Kelvin waves in the spring-summer of 2014 are forced by a significant increase of the Indonesian Throughflow (ITF) transport toward the Indian Ocean, induced by a northward shift of the Mindanao Current retroflection from an intrusion state to a choke state at the entrance of the Indonesian seas. The embryonic 2014 El Niño are suggested to be stalled by the upwelling Kelvin waves.... View Article
By employing an atmosphere-only version of ACCESS, CLEX researchers generated multiple sea surface temperature patterns of the same El Nino and La Nina events, and assessed how this influenced heatwaves over various Australian regions.
It has been a very active time for the Climate Variability and Teleconnections Research Program in terms of research and engagement activities right across the team, including two expeditions - one drilling coral cores in the tropics and another going south to the Antarctic Circumpolar Current.
Bella Blanche writes about spending time on the vast Macfarlane Station in Tambo, Queensland and introduces a methodology to assess risks posed by climate change, and the vulnerability of the native rangeland resources located west of the Great Dividing Range.
Scott Power (Bureau of Meteorology) Overview Rainfall variability in the tropical Pacific caused by El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a major driver of climatic variability in Australia, as well as Asia, North and South America, Africa and over islands throughout the Indo-Pacific. Disruptions to rainfall patterns and intensity over the Pacific Ocean drives droughts, floods and changes severe weather that have major impacts on safety, health, livelihoods and ecosystems. It is therefore important to know how ENSO and the rainfall... View Article
Forecasting El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events, and anticipating how they may change with global warming remains a significant challenge for climate researchers. An ENSO complexity workshop held in November 2017 produced a follow-up paper summarising what we know about ENSO and its predictability.
This project will use one or more simplified climate model(s) to investigate the importance of the tropical stratosphere in modulating the effects of ENSO and the MJO on Southern Hemisphere climate. It can either involve the actual model setup and running, model output analysis, the review of current scientific knowledge and hypotheses, or a combination of these.
Despite the improvement in our understanding, numerical models and observations, El Nino events have dramatic impacts on climate and extreme weather around the globe. This project will further study the nature of this stochastic forcing and its relationship to background SSTs.