It has been remarkable how much we have achieved in this extraordinarily difficult year. Research coming out of the Teleconnections and Variability program over the past four months has strongly focused on how influences in one part of the world can have direct impacts on another.
It has been remarkable how much we have achieved in this extraordinarily difficult year. Research coming out of the Teleconnections and Variability program over the past four months has strongly focused on how influences in one part of the world can have direct impacts on another.
By grouping weather systems by similar patterns rather than averaging conditions over months, seasons or years, CLEX researchers found that between Australia and Antarctica, the ‘doughnut’ structure of SAM is split into multiple ‘flavours’ and is more likely to have ‘bite marks’ out of it than be a perfect ring.
In this project you will investigate the competing effects the Antarctic ozone hole and increasing greenhouse gases have on the Australian summer season rainfall, using the latest climate models. These are now available on the National Computing Infrastructure (NCI) supercomputer and are being used as input into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report.
This project will focus on the connection between conceptual climate models and high resolution general circulation models (GCMs). The student will analyse simplified models that represent teleconnection behaviour and calibrate them to reflect the settings of a GCM. The student will also have access to high dimensional GCM output and can compare an ensemble of “real-world” simulations to the behaviour of the conceptual model using statistical methods.
A lot has happened over the past few months with the publication of high-profile and challenging research and the continuing growth, development and recognition for the RP4 team.
Research by CLEX scientists and colleagues re-examines some of the basic assumptions and interpretations in the theory. In particular, they show the SAM cannot be interpreted as a descriptor of mid-latitude variability and it has little imprint on the weather of the storm track.
This project will use output from state-of-the-art climate simulations of the Last Millennium (850–2005 CE) to explore the long-term variability of an Australian climate driver of the student’s choice. The student will explore the natural variability of that driver to determine its long-term context, and compare with palaeoclimate reconstructions (proxies) where possible.
The Climate Variability and Teleconnections Research Program has formed into three separate clusters – SAM, Tropical Variability and Oceans.