Quantifying and mitigating changes in Australia’s rainfall belts. This project aims to understand how past climate changes affected Australia’s rainfall belts, and to reverse recent changes in rainfall belts. Australia’s climate belts are moving, but it is unclear if the effects on tropical and temperate rainfall will be permanent. This project will use past climate records and palaeoclimate databases to assess how natural and human-induced changes during the past millennium affected Australia’s ....Quantifying and mitigating changes in Australia’s rainfall belts. This project aims to understand how past climate changes affected Australia’s rainfall belts, and to reverse recent changes in rainfall belts. Australia’s climate belts are moving, but it is unclear if the effects on tropical and temperate rainfall will be permanent. This project will use past climate records and palaeoclimate databases to assess how natural and human-induced changes during the past millennium affected Australia’s rainfall zones, and specialised climate model simulations to determine whether greenhouse gas reduction could mitigate future rainfall changes. The outcomes are expected to inform policy and mitigation strategies to secure Australia’s precious water resources.Read moreRead less
Discovery Early Career Researcher Award - Grant ID: DE160100092
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$389,742.00
Summary
What is extreme? Advancing insights into Australia’s variable rainfall. This project aims to address fundamental questions about the causes of Australia’s rainfall variability, providing crucial information about how changing climates affect the water cycle. Bringing together earth system data from ground-based and satellite observations, palaeoclimate reconstructions and climate model simulations, it plans to analyse the processes that cause change in Australia’s rainfall. The project aims to i ....What is extreme? Advancing insights into Australia’s variable rainfall. This project aims to address fundamental questions about the causes of Australia’s rainfall variability, providing crucial information about how changing climates affect the water cycle. Bringing together earth system data from ground-based and satellite observations, palaeoclimate reconstructions and climate model simulations, it plans to analyse the processes that cause change in Australia’s rainfall. The project aims to integrate these datasets using the novel analysis of water isotopes, an important diagnostic of the water cycle. This approach is expected to help evaluate how Australia’s rainfall responds to natural and anthropogenic drivers and identify the processes behind recently observed rainfall extremes.Read moreRead less
Discovery Indigenous Researchers Development - Grant ID: DI110100019
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$199,742.00
Summary
Tracking the response of the Australian climate to abrupt climate change. This project will use cutting-edge climate proxy analyses to reconstruct the response of the Australian climate system to global climate change over the last 2,000 years. The results will provide significant insight in to how future global climate change will impact on social, biological and physical systems in Australia.
Climate and natural hazards in Australasia: a comprehensive impact analysis of prehistoric droughts, great earthquakes, and the Toba super-eruption. Climate change, great earthquakes, and volcanic disasters pose untold risks for environmental, economic, and social harm in rapidly developing Australasia. This project's ground-breaking natural hazard risk analysis will showcase Australasia's research strengths and provide fundamental knowledge for visionary leadership in sustainable development.
Glacio-isostatic effects on geodetic data: Ice and sea level implications. Glacio-isostatic (GI) effects are recorded in geological and geodetic data sets and mask other deformational processes. This project builds on past work using geological data with a focus on combining geodetic and geological evidence to improve knowledge of the past ice sheets, separate out effects of past and present deglaciation and develop improved models for the mantle rheology to include time-dependencies in mantle r ....Glacio-isostatic effects on geodetic data: Ice and sea level implications. Glacio-isostatic (GI) effects are recorded in geological and geodetic data sets and mask other deformational processes. This project builds on past work using geological data with a focus on combining geodetic and geological evidence to improve knowledge of the past ice sheets, separate out effects of past and present deglaciation and develop improved models for the mantle rheology to include time-dependencies in mantle response (transient creep in the first instance). The project aims to provide a complete and predictive description of the GI effects on geodetic data, consistent with geological evidence, such that other tectonic, hydrologic and sea-level signals can be estimated free of these effects.Read moreRead less
Back to the Future: Interglacial Warming and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet . The Antarctic is highly-sensitive to abrupt changes caused by the passing of tipping points within the climate system. Crucially, the instrumental record is too short to resolve major uncertainties surrounding future warming. The Last Interglacial (125,000 yrs ago) was 2°C warmer than today and experienced 6-11 m higher global sea levels. The role of Antarctica is vital for constraining sea-level projections. This Austra ....Back to the Future: Interglacial Warming and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet . The Antarctic is highly-sensitive to abrupt changes caused by the passing of tipping points within the climate system. Crucially, the instrumental record is too short to resolve major uncertainties surrounding future warming. The Last Interglacial (125,000 yrs ago) was 2°C warmer than today and experienced 6-11 m higher global sea levels. The role of Antarctica is vital for constraining sea-level projections. This Australian-led international project aims to determine the mechanisms and impacts of past interglacial Antarctic warming up to 2°C (relative to pre-industrial). Innovative techniques integrating horizontal ice cores and high resolution marine records will help identify polar tipping points and better plan for impacts in Australia.Read moreRead less
Australia's variable rainfall - how dry or wet can it really get? Australia’s rainfall is extremely variable, which means existing weather records are too short to calculate the true risk posed by droughts and floods. This project aims to quantify how naturally variable the rainfall coming from the Indo-Pacific mid-latitudes is, allowing recent rainfall extremes and future projections to be assessed in a long-term context. This project expects to produce new estimates of atmospheric moisture bud ....Australia's variable rainfall - how dry or wet can it really get? Australia’s rainfall is extremely variable, which means existing weather records are too short to calculate the true risk posed by droughts and floods. This project aims to quantify how naturally variable the rainfall coming from the Indo-Pacific mid-latitudes is, allowing recent rainfall extremes and future projections to be assessed in a long-term context. This project expects to produce new estimates of atmospheric moisture budgets between Australia and Antarctica based on a novel, 1000-year length reconstruction of moisture-bearing southern Indian Ocean storms. This new information is critically needed by water managers so that they can properly calculate (and ultimately prepare for) the worst of Australia’s rainfall-related risks.Read moreRead less
Equator to Pole: Reconstructing tropical and Antarctic climate variability over the last millennium and their impacts on southern Australian rainfall. Water resource management is one of the greatest challenges facing sustainable agriculture and urban populations across southern Australia. Key players driving catastrophic droughts in southern Australia are the tropical Indian Ocean Dipole and polar Southern Annual Mode climate systems, which affect moisture availability and transport pathways. T ....Equator to Pole: Reconstructing tropical and Antarctic climate variability over the last millennium and their impacts on southern Australian rainfall. Water resource management is one of the greatest challenges facing sustainable agriculture and urban populations across southern Australia. Key players driving catastrophic droughts in southern Australia are the tropical Indian Ocean Dipole and polar Southern Annual Mode climate systems, which affect moisture availability and transport pathways. This collaborative research project draws together a uniquely-skilled research team to develop targeted coral, ice and cave reconstructions of these climate systems and their impacts on Australian rainfall through the last millennium. This fundamental new knowledge of the drivers of Australian rainfall variability will aid improved predictability of future changes in our valuable water resources. Read moreRead less
Is there a climatic tipping point for Antarctic Bottom Water formation? Antarctic Bottom Water plays an important role in global ocean circulation and climate and yet its formation is also highly sensitive to climate change. This project will analyse new seafloor, core and water samples from the understudied Cape Darnley, East Antarctica, collected on a voyage in early 2022. This new data will be used in combination with an improved high resolution regional ocean model, to understand modern and ....Is there a climatic tipping point for Antarctic Bottom Water formation? Antarctic Bottom Water plays an important role in global ocean circulation and climate and yet its formation is also highly sensitive to climate change. This project will analyse new seafloor, core and water samples from the understudied Cape Darnley, East Antarctica, collected on a voyage in early 2022. This new data will be used in combination with an improved high resolution regional ocean model, to understand modern and past Antarctic Bottom Water formation under different climate states (warmer and colder than present), to determine if there are climate tipping points for the shut down of Antarctic Bottom Water formation. The anticipated benefits include a better understanding of future climate change on this important water mass.Read moreRead less
Calcification and shell chemistry response of Southern Ocean planktic foraminifers to ocean acidification and changing climates. Plankton that form tiny calcium carbonate shells will be cultured to determine how they will respond to acidification of the Southern Ocean caused by rising CO2 in the atmosphere. The same experiments will be used to gauge from their fossil shells how the Southern Ocean has caused and responded to changing atmosphere CO2 over the last glacial climate cycle