This report is not intended as a “science paper”, rather its designed to translate science into action and highlight risks in the way businesses, the military and emergency services should treat risk when it becomes existential.
Using France as a case study, this project aims to create a climatology of heatwaves and droughts to investigate possible connections with voting patterns. The ultimate goal would be to help predict voting patterns in the future and to see whether the techniques could be applied more widely to other countries.
This project will use satellite and flux tower observations to characterise the response of Australian ecosystems to water stress. These data will then be used to evaluate how well the Australian climate model predicts droughts. The successful candidate will obtain skills in programming and analysis of spatial datasets and model outputs.
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.
Research has now begun in earnest in the Drought Research Program with all key staff finally in place. This has proved timely. At the time of writing (August 2018) most of NSW has been drought declared and forecasters suggesting little sign of drought-breaking rains over coming months.
The Heatwaves and Cold Outbreaks Research Program is in full swing, welcoming a new associate investigator in Debbie Hudson from the Bureau of Meteorology and pressing ahead with research across a range of areas.
Steefan Contractor attended the ARCCSS/CLEX winter school from June 25-29, 2018. The theme of the school was climate extremes. It involved lectures in the morning on various climate extremes (such as heatwaves and rainfall extremes) and also a group activity in the afternoons.
It is hoped this proposed synthesis of two ENSO structures, their interaction with each other and how they respond to external forcing, will be the catalyst for future research and practical applications for forecasting and determining the impacts of present and future ENSO events.
This study highlights the importance of simulating global and regional warming responses correctly, to enable more accurate estimates of how the occurrence probability of climate extremes may change in a warming climate.
New research clearly demonstrates the potential to predict long-term LAI using simple ecohydrological theory. This approach could potentially be incorporated into existing terrestrial biosphere models and help improve predictions of LAI.