The Extreme Rainfall Research Program has put personnel in place and is working on research into how extreme rainfall is represented in models.
This is a three-year postdoctoral position focused on high-resolution modelling of extreme rainfall associated with organised convective storms.
Short, extreme rainfall events will increase in a warming climate, according to observations and climate models. Australian observations suggest these storms become smaller in size, with increased rainfall concentrating even more around the centre of the storm cell. However, there has been recent contradictory climate model research that suggests storm areas may become larger. To understand this contradiction the researchers compared two different model types to real world observations of storm cell changes that occurred with rising temperatures. An area... View Article
The CLEX node at Monash is offering several PhD scholarships on a competitive basis. The scholarships may cover fees and living expenses for 3 years. Generous travel support for PhD students to visit our international partners exists. Some projects may involve other universities, the CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology, or one of our international partners.
Convective parameterizations are widely believed to be essential for realistic simulations of the atmosphere, but are crude in today's weather and climate models. CLEX researchers, report on what happens when a number of these models are run with these schemes simply turned off.
In contrast to expectations, tropical thunderstorms without cold pools actually intensify, demonstrating unequivocally that cold pools can be detrimental to convection. Further investigations suggest that organised systems become maintained through atmospheric wave-convection interactions, which is a significantly different process to the established theory.
CLEX researchers writing in Nature Climate Change suggest a paradigm shift in how climate scientists approach climate change impact assessments. They suggest examining the system or potential catastrophe first instead of making the starting point a climate scenario.
It has been raining awards since the new Extreme Rainfall research program began. Most recently, Jason Evans and Julie Arblaster were co-winners of the AMOS Priestley Medal and Christian Jakob was made an AMOS Fellow. Across in Europe, Partner Investigator Sandrine Bony at the Institut Pierre Simon Laplace was awarded the Gérard Mégie Prize by the French Academy of Sciences.
This paper combines existing global evapotranspiration estimates to create a new global product with an observationally constrained estimate of uncertainty. It utilises the latest release of ground-based estimates to show that even point-based evapotranspiration estimates have information about much larger spatial scales.