Drought is a major risk to Australia with extended periods of drought affecting our social, economic and environmental systems. The newly released report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change contains significant new assessments of the science and future projections of drought.
Climate change is affecting the amount of water evaporating (from soils and surfaces) and transpiring (evaporating through plant leaves) from the land surface. Trends derived from DOLCE V3 show clear increases in ET since 1980 over the majority of the Earth’s surface.
CLEX researchers and colleagues combined high-resolution regional climate projections with a process-based hazelnut simulation model to predict future hazelnut yield in Australia.
In this study, CLEX researchers aimed to evaluate the effect of different sources of data and the uncertainties in satellite data, by comparing the data with a ground-based radar product using both location-based and storm-based approaches.
An international review of IPCC reports since 2001 has found that as the science has improved with each report, a trend has appeared showing climate related impacts like heatwaves, the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet and coral bleaching are likely to occur at lower global mean temperatures than estimated in earlier reports.
Observations over Kuala Lumpur and climate model experiments reveal how the warmth of cities compared to the surrounding area enhance extreme rainfall events.
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.
This study presents a method for combining multiple observational datasets of the energy and water budgets at the land surface from different sources into a single hybrid dataset that conserves energy and mass.
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.