CLEX researchers with the Bureau of Meteorology have created a new 20-year-long regularly updated precipitation dataset for Australia using 50 radar sites. This will allow researchers to examine the climatology of extreme events, follow cloud processes, estimate hail size, determine cloud top height and much more.
CLEX researchers and colleagues have developed a downscaling methodology using the HiDRUS model that accurately projects future rainfall in 1km grids at six minute intervals. This will be a boon for urban planners who need to build infrastructure to cope with the different future heavy rainfall events that will occur in a changing climate.
The new WeatheX mobile app takes crowd-sourced observations of wind, hail, flooding and tornadoes. The information gathered from these citizen scientists then goes through a manual quality control process and is stored in a database.