El Niño in a changing climate: novel long-term perspectives from Pacific corals and model simulations. El Niño and La Niña events have a profound influence on Australian drought conditions and rainfall. Forecasting is hampered by short climate records, which do not capture the full range of El Niño dynamics. This project aims to generate records of unprecedented length and spatial coverage from key sites across the western and central equatorial Pacific. Five hundred years of continuous, monthly ....El Niño in a changing climate: novel long-term perspectives from Pacific corals and model simulations. El Niño and La Niña events have a profound influence on Australian drought conditions and rainfall. Forecasting is hampered by short climate records, which do not capture the full range of El Niño dynamics. This project aims to generate records of unprecedented length and spatial coverage from key sites across the western and central equatorial Pacific. Five hundred years of continuous, monthly-resolution climate data will be integrated with output from state-of-the-art climate model simulations to distil the key processes that cause El Niño to vary. This project aims to provide major advances in determining the full range of El Niño and La Niña behaviour, leading to improved forecasts of future changes, with consequences for Australia's water security.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
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