Despite what has been a very challenging year, the Extreme Rainfall research program continues to produce high-quality research, develop deep and wide datasets, extend the reach of our citizen science, and has seen our researchers continue to achieve at a national and international level.
It has been an unprecedented year in academia in 2020, a year where many people have been doing it tough in particular those of you in Victoria. The impact of COVID will take a long time to be fully realized of course, with impacts on our students, researchers, administration and technical teams that we could not anticipate.
Australia researchers are calling on storm chasers and members of the general public fascinated by severe weather to take part in a citizen science project that will help better capture the occurrence of extreme weather events and improve our ability to forecast them.
Following a workshop with all the stakeholders, the Weathex app received funds for a range of updates that are available now.
The Knowledge Brokerage Team has existed for a little over a year and it’s timely to reflect on some of the activities the team has been involved in.
The CLEX Knowledge Brokerage Team (KBT) is now well and truly bedded down after coming into existence in October 2018. Team leader Ian Macadam has visited each of the CLEX university nodes and has attempted to answer the question on everyone’s lips “So what is a knowledge broker anyway?”.
There have been some noticeably positive developments over the past four months. The website has been transferred to a faster server, we have had a very successful combined CoE media workshop, we launched WeatheX and are moving towards starting a new Instagram account.
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.
A range of international workshops, a new citizen science app and some significant research has made the past four months a busy time for the Extreme Rainfall research program.
Severe thunderstorms across Queensland on Sunday, October 21, provided the first opportunity for citizen scientists to report severe weather using the WeatheX app.