While the Extremes Rainfall RP has found itself in challenging times as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, they have still found moments to celebrate and have been delighted by the enormous range of extraordinary research.
New research suggests that increasing spatial resolution alone is not sufficient to obtain a systematic improvement in the simulation of precipitation extremes, and other improvements (e.g. physics, tuning) may be required.
Australian researchers assess the ability of recently released climate models to simulate the climate of Australia and the new scenarios for 21st Century climate change.
Focusing on the land regions around the world, the researchers assessed the representation of annual maximum of daily precipitation (Rx1day) across 22 observational products gridded at 1°x1° resolution.
The primary goal of this project is to conduct an evaluation of the CMIP5 models for precipitation extremes over Australia. To that end, the student will assess how models simulate key precipitation metrics in comparison to observations.
The objective of the project is to use a combination of station-based measurements and reanalyses (e.g. BARRA, ERA-5) to create a climatology of precipitable water for Australia. After creating the dataset, the student will also analyse trends and variability.
The aim of this student project is to investigate the impacts of climate change on hydrological extremes, such as high runoff events, hydrological or agricultural drought. It uses outputs of the AWRA-L hydrological model, which underpins the BoM's Australian Landscape Water Balance website.
CLEX researchers found that applying a statistical correction to projected sea surface temperatures has a major impact on changes to rainfall with global warming, leading to a 25% reduction in future precipitation projected for the south-western Pacific.
Computer models used to simulate global climate agree the climate will warm in response to increasing atmospheric greenhouse gases. However, a recent paper by Bador et al. (2018)1 includes results that highlight our uncertainty about exactly how extremely wet conditions will change in Australia. Further development of Australia’s national climate model, ACCESS, may help reduce this uncertainty.
Under future global warming, models shows increases in the wettest day of the season or year exceeds the range of changes explained by natural variability in most land areas.