An unusual southern stratospheric warming event amplified the conditions that led to the Black Summer bushfires of 2019/20. CLEX researchers explored how frequently these rare warming events may occur with climate change.
CLEX researchers introduced a novel methodology to examine the Southern Ocean's response to changing winds. They performed numerical simulations with a global ocean‐sea ice model suite that spans a hierarchy of spatial resolutions and driven by realistic atmospheric forcing conditions.
To shed more light on short droughts of the past, CLEX researchers took advantage of a newly released dataset from the Bureau of Meteorology to re-examine the infamous Centennial Drought of 1888. Using the new dataset along with historical station data, they analysed monthly rainfall variability across south eastern Australia throughout 1888.
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.
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.
Large areas of northern Queensland experienced extreme rainfall and severe flooding in late January and February 2019. This briefing note examines the impacts and some of the likely causes of the event.