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.
Lee Constable interviews Prof Christian Jakob about what we don't know about climate change for her channel on the Cimpatico Studios platform, Climate Australia.
While the data from Himiwari-8 provides very useful data on clouds at relatively high resolution, researchers need to know if it produced any biases, particularly around cloud-top height and cloud-top temperature, whose roles are critical in shaping Earth’s climate. CLEX researchers and Australian colleagues compared the Himawari-8 data for both of these measures with existing datasets.
CLEX researchers find strong correlation between ozone hole size and Australian summer temperatures. While there is no causal link between the two, the changes are driven by the same source - ocean temperatures.
This interdisciplinary project will apply methods from statistical physics, which are only beginning to be used in the environmental sciences, to better exploit such data, advance our basic understanding, and produce more useful models for weather and climate changes.