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.
PhD student Charuni Pathmeswaran was invited as a climate scientist to take part in a young professionals’ event organized by the NESP Earth Systems and Climate and Change (ESCC) Hub and jointly hosted by the Actuaries Institute and Engineers Australia.
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.
This study illustrates how future uncertainty of climate models in predicting hot extremes is controlled by two factors, both related to amplification of hot extremes through land-atmosphere interactions
The Australian FLUXNET data provide perhaps the world’s most valuable observations for building and evaluating the land models needed for projecting future droughts and heatwaves.
A focus on building resilience in health and health infrastructure is needed to deal with the future effects of extreme events – both due to climate change and climate variability.
The Drought program has been strongly focused on evaluating and improving climate models, and developing a drought database for documenting drought and for benchmarking model performance.
This paper shows that many models overestimate the interaction between hot and dry conditions in wet regions and therefore overamplify heat extremes. The study points to necessary model improvement to increase confidence in future projections of heat extremes.