School of Earth Sciences - Research Publications
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ItemAn improved diagnostic for summertime rainfall along the eastern seaboard of Australia(WILEY, 2015-12)ABSTRACT The eastern seaboard of Australia (ESB) is a unique climate entity. A region of complex topography bound by the coastline and the ridge of the Great Dividing Range, the ESB exhibits distinctly different rainfall patterns to the rest of southeastern Australia. As a large percentage of the Australian population resides along the ESB, understanding current and future rainfall variability in this region presents an important and difficult challenge. This challenge is compounded by the inability of most general circulation models to properly resolve the region. This study presents a diagnostic for characterizing the variability in summertime rainfall along the ESB. This simple yet effective East Coast Flow Index (ECFI) infers easterly geostrophic flow from the meridional pressure gradient along the ESB, and vertical circulation from the upper‐level ω field. The ECFI outperforms the common indices for drivers of rainfall variability, achieving statistically significant correlations with ESB summertime rainfall for a range of different timescales. The ECFI is shown to have great potential as a predictor for statistically downscaling rainfall along the ESB as (1) it provides a physical link between large‐scale forcings and local precipitation responses, (2) is capable of capturing multiyear variability and (3) is realistically represented by general circulation models. While the ECFI was designed for the summer months (December–February) it is still capable of performing well in the other seasons, especially spring (September–November).
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ItemNo Preview AvailableSouthern Australia's warmest October on record: The role of ENSO and climate change(American Meteorological Society, 2016-12-01)Anthropogenic climate change was found to have a substantial influence on southern Australia’s extreme heat in October 2015. The relative influence of El Niño conditions was less clear.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableThe weather@home regional climate modelling project for Australia and New Zealand(COPERNICUS GESELLSCHAFT MBH, 2016-09-15)Abstract. A new climate modelling project has been developed for regional climate simulation and the attribution of weather and climate extremes over Australia and New Zealand. The project, known as weather@home Australia–New Zealand, uses public volunteers' home computers to run a moderate-resolution global atmospheric model with a nested regional model over the Australasian region. By harnessing the aggregated computing power of home computers, weather@home is able to generate an unprecedented number of simulations of possible weather under various climate scenarios. This combination of large ensemble sizes with high spatial resolution allows extreme events to be examined with well-constrained estimates of sampling uncertainty. This paper provides an overview of the weather@home Australia–New Zealand project, including initial evaluation of the regional model performance. The model is seen to be capable of resolving many climate features that are important for the Australian and New Zealand regions, including the influence of El Niño–Southern Oscillation on driving natural climate variability. To date, 75 model simulations of the historical climate have been successfully integrated over the period 1985–2014 in a time-slice manner. In addition, multi-thousand member ensembles have also been generated for the years 2013, 2014 and 2015 under climate scenarios with and without the effect of human influences. All data generated by the project are freely available to the broader research community.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableTHE ROLES OF CLIMATE CHANGE AND EL NINO IN THE RECORD LOW RAINFALL IN OCTOBER 2015 IN TASMANIA, AUSTRALIA(AMER METEOROLOGICAL SOC, 2016-12)
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ItemNo Preview AvailableTHE CONTRIBUTION OF ANTHROPOGENIC FORCING TO THE ADELAIDE AND MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA, HEAT WAVES OF JANUARY 2014(AMER METEOROLOGICAL SOC, 2015-12)
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ItemNo Preview AvailableINCREASED LIKELIHOOD OF BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA, G20 HEAT EVENT DUE TO ANTHROPOGENIC CLIMATE CHANGE(AMER METEOROLOGICAL SOC, 2015-12)
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ItemNo Preview AvailableATTRIBUTION OF EXCEPTIONAL MEAN SEA LEVEL PRESSURE ANOMALIES SOUTH OF AUSTRALIA IN AUGUST 2014(AMER METEOROLOGICAL SOC, 2015-12)