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 paper used statistical techniques to investigate changes in extreme climate events that currently occur, on average, only once every 20 years. These techniques are applied to data related to heat, rainfall, drought and conditions conducive to bushfires and thunderstorms from detailed climate modelling commissioned by NSW and ACT Governments.
The largest rivers on Earth are not on the ground, but in the sky. Our new study, published in Environmental Research Letters, showed that nine out of ten of the most expensive floods in New Zealand (2007-2017) occurred during an Atmospheric River event, and seven to all ten of the top ten most extreme rainfall events at eleven different locations occurred during Atmospheric Rivers.
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.
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.
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.