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.
Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick (CCRC UNSW)
An unusually strong East Australian Current extension leads to an increased probability of marine heatwave days around Tasmania. Conversely, a strong Zeehan Current during these seasons decreased the probability of marine heatwave days in this region.
The Central American mid‐summer drought (MSD) is the decline in rainfall during the middle of the wet season over Central America, which has been shown to have strong effects on agriculture and bushfires in Costa Rica. The Madden–Julian oscillation (MJO) has been shown to influence Costa Rican rainfall on intra‐seasonal time scales, and therefore may be important to the MSD. This research aims to find the connection between the MJO and MSD.
Heat waves are the deadliest natural hazard in Australia. Motivated by the prediction that the number of extremely hot days in subtropical Australia will increase in a warmer climate, this study aims to develop a comprehensive picture of the processes leading to extreme temperatures.
Heatwaves have increased in their intensity, frequency and duration. It is now well-established that heatwaves are not stand-alone events, but occur in the presence of other extremes, such as, droughts, extremely high atmospheric pressure, or teleconnections to other atmospheric phenomena. The PhD will undertake a novel examination of the attribution of heatwaves, coincident with other plausible extreme events.
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.
This paper examined the likelihood of extreme marine heatwaves global using climate models simulations, with and without anthropogenic influences, concluding that these events were up to fifty times more likely due to anthropogenic climate change.
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.