This is a tough and unique time for everyone in CLEX. I had anticipated the pandemic being over by now (note the predictive skill of a modeller) and it is confronting to be writing this while Victoria is in lockdown and world leaders are worried about shower pressure.
CLEX researchers and colleagues find soil moisture variations need to be considered over at least a decade before a steady-state assumption can be made.
An analysis of new climate model projections by Australian researchers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes shows southwestern Australia and parts of southern Australia will see longer and more intense droughts due to a lack of rainfall caused by climate change.
New research shows, contrary to expectation, the inter-annual variance in evapotranspiration is much smaller than for precipitation, runoff and soil storage. Accounting for hydrologic covariances explains why it is possible for variability in the principal sink (e.g., streamflow) to exceed variability in the source (precipitation).
CLEX researchers and colleagues found the Aridity Index was too simplistic to capture the many aspects that define landscape aridity, including the amount of rainfall, water resources and vegetation productivity, and is a poor indicator of future aridity changes.
New research suggests that the concept of maximum evaporation reported here is a natural attribute of an extensive wet evaporating surface. This provides a fundamental new insight as to how radiation, evaporation and temperature are interlinked.
New research in Nature Climate Change suggests droughts may not increase as a result of climate change. This finding resulted from researchers investigating an apparent climate model contradiction that saw climate change projections of the 21st Century produce increased droughts along with more run-off and a greening of the landscape