Climate change will affect prescribed burning days in the future. Unexpectedly, it is not all bad news, but as the coming century progresses there are definitely changes ahead for our firefighters in Australia when it comes to preparing for a fire season, especially along the east coast of Australia.
New research shows regional climate models consistently provide added value across Australia compared to global climate models. As a result, researchers and policymakers can obtain plausible improvements in future climate projections from the current generation of available RCMs.
CLEX researchers found that regions where there is a larger drying trend tend to be more sensitive to land water availability and have more heatwave days. They found that the effect of dry soils before a heatwave varies considerably across Australia.
Catastrophic wildfires like the Black Saturday wildfires in 2009 and Canberra Wildfires of 2003, which were so large and dangerous that they generated their own weather systems – including the world’s first filmed fire tornado – are likely to be more frequent in the future as a result of climate change across southeast Australia
This project aims to discover where and when regional climate models improve (or not) on the simulation of Australian heatwaves, relative to their host global climate models.
Schools Weather and Air Quality (SWAQ) is a citizen science project funded by the Australian Government’s Department of Industry, Innovation and Science as part of its Inspiring Australia - Citizen Engagement Program.
CLEX researchers evaluate the performance of CORDEX simulations over Australia against gridded observations of temperature and precipitation.
The Schools Weather and Air Quality (SWAQ) network is placing instruments in Sydney schools to fill gaps in meteorological and air quality observational sites (www.swaq.org.au). This project will contribute to the development of the SWAQ network and assess the influences of spatial variability in Sydney's urban climate and air quality.