UNSW05: Quantification of Continental-Scale shifts in Extreme Precipitation Intensity Across the Globe

Due to the lack of appropriate historical datasets, quantification of shifts in global extreme precipitation intensity has not been possible so far. This project will use a recently developed long-term global dataset of daily precipitation alongside a dataset of global temperature changes to calculate the CC scaling for broad climatic regions across the globe.

Supervisors: Dr Steefan Contractor (s.contractor@unsw.edu.au), Prof Lisa Alexander (l.alexander@unsw.edu.au), Dr Markus Donat (markus.donat@bcs.es)

Extreme precipitation is expected to increase globally at around 6.5%/K as defined by the Clausius-Clapeyron (CC) relationship. However, this rate can vary spatially due to non-thermodynamic contributions. Due to the lack of appropriate historical datasets, quantification of shifts in global extreme precipitation intensity has not been possible so far. This project will use a recently developed long-term global dataset of daily precipitation alongside a dataset of global temperature changes to calculate the CC scaling for broad climatic regions across the globe.

Fig 1: Changes in the magnitude of daily and hourly rainfall for different definitions of extreme rainfall.

Location: UNSW Sydney

To apply: the Undergraduate Scholarship application form can be found here