ORCID Profile
0000-0002-7917-1069
Current Organisation
Monash University
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In Research Link Australia (RLA), "Research Topics" refer to ANZSRC FOR and SEO codes. These topics are either sourced from ANZSRC FOR and SEO codes listed in researchers' related grants or generated by a large language model (LLM) based on their publications.
Atmospheric Sciences | Atmospheric Dynamics | Surface Processes | Physical oceanography | Water Resources Engineering | Surfacewater Hydrology | Meteorology | Climate change processes | Atmospheric dynamics | Civil Engineering | Atmospheric sciences | Physical Oceanography | Meteorology | Climatology (excl. Climate Change Processes) | Climate Change Processes
Climate Variability (excl. Social Impacts) | Effects of Climate Change and Variability on Australia (excl. Social Impacts) | Atmospheric Processes and Dynamics | Climate Change Models | Urban Water Policy |
Publisher: Copernicus GmbH
Date: 18-12-2015
Abstract: Abstract. Reconstructions of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) ideally require high-quality, annually resolved and long-running palaeoclimate proxy records in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, located in ENSO's centre of action. However, to date, the palaeoclimate records that have been extracted in the region are short or temporally and spatially sporadic, limiting the information that can be provided by these reconstructions. Consequently, most ENSO reconstructions exploit the downstream influences of ENSO on remote locations, known as teleconnections, where longer records from palaeoclimate proxies exist. However, using teleconnections to reconstruct ENSO relies on the assumption that the relationship between ENSO and the remote location is stationary in time. Increasing evidence from observations and climate models suggests that some teleconnections are, in fact, non-stationary, potentially threatening the validity of those palaeoclimate reconstructions that exploit teleconnections. This study examines the implications of non-stationary teleconnections on modern multi-proxy reconstructions of ENSO variance. The sensitivity of the reconstructions to non-stationary teleconnections were tested using a suite of idealised pseudoproxy experiments that employed output from a fully coupled global climate model. Reconstructions of the variance in the Niño 3.4 index representing ENSO variability were generated using four different methods. Surface temperature data from the GFDL CM2.1 were used as pseudoproxies for these reconstruction methods. As well as sensitivity of the reconstruction to the method, the experiments tested the sensitivity of the reconstruction to the number of non-stationary pseudoproxies and the location of these proxies. We find that non-stationarities can act to degrade the skill of ENSO variance reconstructions. However, when global, randomly spaced networks (assuming a minimum of approximately 20 proxies) were employed, the resulting pseudoproxy ENSO reconstructions were not sensitive to non-stationary teleconnections. Neglecting proxies from ENSO's centre of action still produced skilful reconstructions, but with a lower likelihood. Different reconstruction methods exhibited varying sensitivities to non-stationary pseudoproxies, which affected the robustness of the resulting reconstructions. The results suggest that caution should be taken when developing reconstructions using proxies from a single teleconnected region, or those that use less than 20 source proxies.
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Date: 08-12-2020
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Date: 08-12-2020
Publisher: American Geophysical Union (AGU)
Date: 14-11-2015
DOI: 10.1002/2015GL066319
Publisher: Copernicus GmbH
Date: 12-07-2012
DOI: 10.5194/HESS-16-2049-2012
Abstract: Abstract. Isolating the causes of extreme variations or changes in the hydroclimate is difficult due to the complexities of the driving mechanisms, but it is crucial for effective natural resource management. In Australia's Murray-Darling Basin (MDB), ocean-atmosphere processes causing hydroclimatic variations occur on time scales from days to centuries, all are important, and none are likely to act in isolation. Instead, interactions between all hydroclimatic drivers, on multiple time scales, are likely to have caused the variations observed in MDB instrumental records. A simplified framework is presented to assist natural resource managers in identifying the potential causes of hydroclimatic anomalies. The framework condenses an event into its fundamental elements, including its spatial and temporal signal and small-scale evolution. The climatic processes that are potentially responsible are then examined to determine possible causes. The framework was applied to a period of prolonged and severe dry conditions occurring in the southern MDB from 1997–2010, providing insights into possible causal mechanisms that are consistent with recent studies. The framework also assists in identifying uncertainties and gaps in our understanding that need to be addressed.
Publisher: American Meteorological Society
Date: 08-2017
Abstract: The sensitivity of near-surface urban meteorological conditions to three different soil moisture initialization experiments under heat-wave conditions is investigated for the city of Melbourne, Australia. The Weather Research and Forecasting Model is used to simulate a domain over Melbourne and its surrounding rural areas. The experiments employ three suites of simulations. Two suites initialize the model with soil moisture from the top layer of the ERA-Interim soil moisture data with a 3-month and 24-h coupled spinup period, respectively. The third suite initializes the model with the arguably more realistic soil moistures from the Australian Water Availability Project (AWAP), which are an order of magnitude drier than the ERA-Interim data, again using a 24-h spinup period. The simulations employing the AWAP data are found to have smaller errors when compared with observations, with biases in urban maximum temperature reduced by 4.1°C and biases in the skin temperature reduced by 3.0°C relative to the biases of the 3-month-spinup experiment. Despite urban areas only having a small proportion of soil-covered surfaces, the results show that urban soils have a greater influence on urban near-surface temperatures at night, whereas rural soils have a greater influence on urban near-surface temperatures during the daytime.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 04-11-2012
Publisher: American Geophysical Union (AGU)
Date: 12-03-2016
DOI: 10.1002/2016GL067740
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 03-2020
Publisher: American Meteorological Society
Date: 09-09-2013
DOI: 10.1175/JCLI-D-12-00108.1
Abstract: The past 1500 years provide a valuable opportunity to study the response of the climate system to external forcings. However, the integration of paleoclimate proxies with climate modeling is critical to improving the understanding of climate dynamics. In this paper, a climate system model and proxy records are therefore used to study the role of natural and anthropogenic forcings in driving the global climate. The inverse and forward approaches to paleoclimate data–model comparison are applied, and sources of uncertainty are identified and discussed. In the first of two case studies, the climate model simulations are compared with multiproxy temperature reconstructions. Robust solar and volcanic signals are detected in Southern Hemisphere temperatures, with a possible volcanic signal detected in the Northern Hemisphere. The anthropogenic signal dominates during the industrial period. It is also found that seasonal and geographical biases may cause multiproxy reconstructions to overestimate the magnitude of the long-term preindustrial cooling trend. In the second case study, the model simulations are compared with a coral δ18O record from the central Pacific Ocean. It is found that greenhouse gases, solar irradiance, and volcanic eruptions all influence the mean state of the central Pacific, but there is no evidence that natural or anthropogenic forcings have any systematic impact on El Niño–Southern Oscillation. The proxy climate relationship is found to change over time, challenging the assumption of stationarity that underlies the interpretation of paleoclimate proxies. These case studies demonstrate the value of paleoclimate data–model comparison but also highlight the limitations of current techniques and demonstrate the need to develop alternative approaches.
Publisher: IOP Publishing
Date: 30-03-2017
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 10-10-2021
Publisher: American Meteorological Society
Date: 15-11-2013
DOI: 10.1175/JCLI-D-12-00338.1
Abstract: The stationarity of relationships between local and remote climates is a necessary, yet implicit, assumption underlying many paleoclimate reconstructions. However, the assumption is tenuous for many seasonal relationships between interannual variations in the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the southern annular mode (SAM) and Australasian precipitation and mean temperatures. Nonstationary statistical relationships between local and remote climates on the 31–71-yr time scale, defined as a change in their strength and/or phase outside that expected from local climate noise, are detected on near-centennial time scales from instrumental data, climate model simulations, and paleoclimate proxies. The relationships between ENSO and SAM and Australasian precipitation were nonstationary at 21%–37% of Australasian stations from 1900 to 2009 and strongly covaried, suggesting common modulation. Control simulations from three coupled climate models produce ENSO-like and SAM-like patterns of variability, but differ in detail to the observed patterns in Australasia. However, the model teleconnections also display nonstationarity, in some cases for over 50% of the domain. Therefore, nonstationary local–remote climatic relationships are inherent in environments regulated by internal variability. The assessments using paleoclimate reconstructions are not robust because of extraneous noise associated with the paleoclimate proxies. Instrumental records provide the only means of calibrating and evaluating regional paleoclimate reconstructions. However, the length of Australasian instrumental observations may be too short to capture the near-centennial-scale variations in local–remote climatic relationships, potentially compromising these reconstructions. The uncertainty surrounding nonstationary teleconnections must be acknowledged and quantified. This should include interpreting nonstationarities in paleoclimate reconstructions using physically based frameworks.
Publisher: Copernicus GmbH
Date: 20-12-2017
Abstract: Abstract. Water availability is fundamental to societies and ecosystems, but our understanding of variations in hydroclimate (including extreme events, flooding, and decadal periods of drought) is limited because of a paucity of modern instrumental observations that are distributed unevenly across the globe and only span parts of the 20th and 21st centuries. Such data coverage is insufficient for characterizing hydroclimate and its associated dynamics because of its multidecadal to centennial variability and highly regionalized spatial signature. High-resolution (seasonal to decadal) hydroclimatic proxies that span all or parts of the Common Era (CE) and paleoclimate simulations from climate models are therefore important tools for augmenting our understanding of hydroclimate variability. In particular, the comparison of the two sources of information is critical for addressing the uncertainties and limitations of both while enriching each of their interpretations. We review the principal proxy data available for hydroclimatic reconstructions over the CE and highlight the contemporary understanding of how these proxies are interpreted as hydroclimate indicators. We also review the available last-millennium simulations from fully coupled climate models and discuss several outstanding challenges associated with simulating hydroclimate variability and change over the CE. A specific review of simulated hydroclimatic changes forced by volcanic events is provided, as is a discussion of expected improvements in estimated radiative forcings, models, and their implementation in the future. Our review of hydroclimatic proxies and last-millennium model simulations is used as the basis for articulating a variety of considerations and best practices for how to perform proxy–model comparisons of CE hydroclimate. This discussion provides a framework for how best to evaluate hydroclimate variability and its associated dynamics using these comparisons and how they can better inform interpretations of both proxy data and model simulations. We subsequently explore means of using proxy–model comparisons to better constrain and characterize future hydroclimate risks. This is explored specifically in the context of several ex les that demonstrate how proxy–model comparisons can be used to quantitatively constrain future hydroclimatic risks as estimated from climate model projections.
Publisher: American Meteorological Society
Date: 12-2010
Abstract: Changes in the area of Australia experiencing concurrent temperature and rainfall extremes are investigated through the use of two combined indices. The indices describe variations between the fraction of land area experiencing extreme cold and dry or hot and wet conditions. There is a high level of agreement between the variations and trends of the indices from 1957 to 2008 when computed using (i) a spatially complete gridded dataset without rigorous quality control checks and (ii) spatially incomplete high-quality station datasets with rigorous quality control checks. Australian extremes are examined starting from 1911, which is the first time a broad-scale assessment of Australian temperature extremes has been performed prior to 1957. Over the whole country, the results show an increase in the extent of hot and wet extremes and a decrease in the extent of cold and dry extremes annually and during all seasons from 1911 to 2008 at a rate of between 1% and 2% decade−1. These trends mostly stem from changes in tropical regions during summer and spring. There are relationships between the extent of extreme maximum temperatures, precipitation, and soil moisture on interannual and decadal time scales that are similar to the relationships exhibited by variations of the means. However, the trends from 1911 to 2008 and from 1957 to 2008 are not consistent with these relationships, providing evidence that the processes causing the interannual variations and those causing the longer-term trends are different.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 26-05-2019
Publisher: American Geophysical Union (AGU)
Date: 26-04-2011
DOI: 10.1029/2010WR009832
Publisher: American Meteorological Society
Date: 04-2021
Abstract: ‘Flash drought’ (FD) describes the rapid onset of drought on sub-seasonal times scales. It is of particular interest for agriculture as it can deplete soil moisture for crop growth in just a few weeks. To better understand the processes causing FD, we evaluate the importance of evaporative demand and precipitation by comparing three different drought indices that estimate this hazard using meteorological and hydrological parameters from the CMIP5 suite of models. We apply the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) the Evaporative Demand Drought Index (EDDI), derived from evaporative demand (E 0 ) and the Evaporative Stress Index (ESI), which connects atmospheric and soil moisture conditions by measuring the ratio of actual and potential evaporation. The results show moderate-to-strong relationships (r 2 0.5) between drought indices and upper level soil moisture on daily time scales, especially in drought-prone regions. We find that all indices are able to identify FD in the top 10-cm layer of soil moisture in a similar proportion to that in the models’ climatologies. However, there is significant inter-model spread in the characteristics of the FDs identified. This spread is mainly caused by an overestimation of E 0 , indicating stark differences in the land surface models and coupling in in idual CMIP5 models. Of all indices, the SPI provides the highest skill in predicting FD prior to or at the time of onset in soil moisture, while both EDDI and ESI show significantly lower skill. The results highlight that the lack of precipitation is the main contributor to FDs in climate models, with E 0 playing a secondary role.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 30-11-2017
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 18-06-2012
DOI: 10.1002/JOC.3540
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 14-04-2013
DOI: 10.1038/NGEO1778
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 22-03-2019
Publisher: Copernicus GmbH
Date: 10-11-2020
DOI: 10.5194/CP-2020-134
Abstract: Abstract. Paleoclimate archives, such as high-resolution ice core records, provide a means to investigate long-term (multi-centennial) climate variability. Until recently, the Law Dome (Dome Summit South) ice core record remained one of few long-term high-resolution records in East Antarctica. A new ice core drilled in 2017/2018 at Mount Brown South, approximately 1000 km west of Law Dome, provides an additional high-resolution record that will likely span the last millennium in the Indian Ocean sector of East Antarctica. Here, we compare snowfall accumulation rates and sea salt concentrations in the upper portion (~21 m) of the Mount Brown South record, and an updated Law Dome record over the period 1975–2016. Annual sea salt concentrations from the Mount Brown South record preserves a stronger signal for the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO in austral winter and spring, r = 0.521, p
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 12-2022
Publisher: American Geophysical Union (AGU)
Date: 22-09-2020
DOI: 10.1029/2019JD031946
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 07-05-2014
DOI: 10.1038/NATURE13260
Abstract: Rapid Arctic warming and sea-ice reduction in the Arctic Ocean are widely attributed to anthropogenic climate change. The Arctic warming exceeds the global average warming because of feedbacks that include sea-ice reduction and other dynamical and radiative feedbacks. We find that the most prominent annual mean surface and tropospheric warming in the Arctic since 1979 has occurred in northeastern Canada and Greenland. In this region, much of the year-to-year temperature variability is associated with the leading mode of large-scale circulation variability in the North Atlantic, namely, the North Atlantic Oscillation. Here we show that the recent warming in this region is strongly associated with a negative trend in the North Atlantic Oscillation, which is a response to anomalous Rossby wave-train activity originating in the tropical Pacific. Atmospheric model experiments forced by prescribed tropical sea surface temperatures simulate the observed circulation changes and associated tropospheric and surface warming over northeastern Canada and Greenland. Experiments from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (ref. 16) models with prescribed anthropogenic forcing show no similar circulation changes related to the North Atlantic Oscillation or associated tropospheric warming. This suggests that a substantial portion of recent warming in the northeastern Canada and Greenland sector of the Arctic arises from unforced natural variability.
Publisher: American Meteorological Society
Date: 08-2018
Abstract: The ability of cool roofs and vegetation to reduce urban temperatures and improve human thermal stress during heat wave conditions is investigated for the city of Melbourne, Australia. The Weather Research and Forecasting Model coupled to the Princeton Urban Canopy Model is employed to simulate 11 scenarios of cool roof uptake across the city, increased vegetation cover across the city, and a combination of these strategies. Cool roofs reduce urban temperatures during the day, and, if they are installed across enough rooftops, their cooling effect extends to the night. In contrast, increasing vegetation coverage reduces nighttime temperatures but results in minimal cooling during the hottest part of the day. The combination of cool roofs and increased vegetation scenarios creates the largest reduction in temperature throughout the heat wave, although the relationship between the combination scenarios is nonsynergistic. This means that the cooling occurring from the combination of both strategies is either larger or smaller than if the cooling from in idual strategies were to be added together. The drier, lower-density western suburbs of Melbourne showed a greater cooling response to increased vegetation without enhancing human thermal stress due to the corresponding increase in humidity. The leafy medium-density eastern suburbs of Melbourne showed a greater cooling response to the installation of cool roofs. These results highlight that the optimal urban cooling strategies can be different across a single urban center.
Publisher: American Meteorological Society
Date: 10-07-2016
DOI: 10.1175/JCLI-D-13-00781.1
Abstract: Multiproxy warm season (September–February) temperature reconstructions are presented for the combined land–ocean region of Australasia (0°–50°S, 110°E–180°) covering 1000–2001. Using between 2 (R2) and 28 (R28) paleoclimate records, four 1000-member ensemble reconstructions of regional temperature are developed using four statistical methods: principal component regression (PCR), composite plus scale (CPS), Bayesian hierarchical models (LNA), and pairwise comparison (PaiCo). The reconstructions are then compared with a three-member ensemble of GISS-E2-R climate model simulations and independent paleoclimate records. Decadal fluctuations in Australasian temperatures are remarkably similar between the four reconstruction methods. There are, however, differences in the litude of temperature variations between the different statistical methods and proxy networks. When the R28 network is used, the warmest 30-yr periods occur after 1950 in 77% of ensemble members over all methods. However, reconstructions based on only the longest records (R2 and R3 networks) indicate that single 30- and 10-yr periods of similar or slightly higher temperatures than in the late twentieth century may have occurred during the first half of the millennium. Regardless, the most recent instrumental temperatures (1985–2014) are above the 90th percentile of all 12 reconstruction ensembles (four reconstruction methods based on three proxy networks—R28, R3, and R2). The reconstructed twentieth-century warming cannot be explained by natural variability alone using GISS-E2-R. In this climate model, anthropogenic forcing is required to produce the rate and magnitude of post-1950 warming observed in the Australasian region. These paleoclimate results are consistent with other studies that attribute the post-1950 warming in Australian temperature records to increases in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations.
Publisher: American Meteorological Society
Date: 10-02-2014
DOI: 10.1175/JCLI-D-12-00783.1
Abstract: The utility of a combined modified climate extremes index (mCEI) is presented for monitoring coherent trends in multiple types of climate extremes across large regions. Its usefulness lies in its ability to distill complex spatiotemporal fields into a simple, flexible nonparametric index. Two versions of the mCEI are computed that incorporate changes in several annual- or daily-scale temperature-related and moisture-related extremes. Applying data from the contiguous United States, Europe, and Australia detects consistent and statistically significant increases in the spatial prevalence of climate extremes from 1950 to 2012. All three continental-scale regions show increasingly widespread warm annual- and daily-scale minimum and maximum temperature extremes, a decreasing spatial extent of cool annual- and daily-scale minimum and maximum temperature extremes, and increasing areas where the proportion of annual total precipitation falls on heavy-rain days. There were no statistically significant trends toward more widespread, annual-scale drought or moisture surplus in any region. The dependence of annual extremes on the frequency of daily-scale extremes is highlighted by the strong covariations between annual- and daily-scale extremes in all regions. By the nature of construction of the combined indices, the differences in the trends of the mCEI and daily-scale mCEI (dmCEI) suggest that extremes in more areas are changing primarily because of a shift of temperature and daily rainfall distributions toward warm extremes and heavy-rainfall extremes.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 03-2018
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 30-08-2019
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 11-2020
Publisher: American Geophysical Union (AGU)
Date: 07-2009
DOI: 10.1029/2009GL039026
Publisher: IOP Publishing
Date: 24-05-2021
Abstract: Flash droughts can be distinguished by rapid intensification from near-normal soil moisture to drought conditions in a matter of weeks. Here, we provide the first characterisation of a climatology of flash drought across Australia using a suite of indices. The experiment is designed to capture a range of conditions related to drought: evaporative demand describes the atmospheric demand for moisture from the surface precipitation, the supply of moisture from the atmosphere to the surface and evaporative stress, the supply of moisture from the surface relative to the demand from the atmosphere. We show that regardless of the definition, flash droughts occur in all seasons. They can terminate as rapidly as they start, but in some cases can last many months, resulting in a seasonal-scale drought. We show that flash-drought variability and its prevalence can be related to phases of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, highlighting scope for seasonal-scale prediction. Using a case study in southeast Australia, we show that monitoring precipitation is less useful for capturing the onset of flash drought as it occurs. Instead, indices like the Evaporative Demand Drought Index and Evaporative Stress Index are more useful for monitoring flash-drought development.
Publisher: Copernicus GmbH
Date: 08-03-2016
Abstract: Abstract. Ice cores provide some of the best-dated and most comprehensive proxy records, as they yield a vast and growing array of proxy indicators. Selecting a site for ice core drilling is nonetheless challenging, as the assessment of potential new sites needs to consider a variety of factors. Here, we demonstrate a systematic approach to site selection for a new East Antarctic high-resolution ice core record. Specifically, seven criteria are considered: (1) 2000-year-old ice at 300 m depth (2) above 1000 m elevation (3) a minimum accumulation rate of 250 mm years−1 IE (ice equivalent) (4) minimal surface reworking to preserve the deposited climate signal (5) a site with minimal displacement or elevation change in ice at 300 m depth (6) a strong teleconnection to midlatitude climate and (7) an appropriately complementary relationship to the existing Law Dome record (a high-resolution record in East Antarctica). Once assessment of these physical characteristics identified promising regions, logistical considerations (for site access and ice core retrieval) were briefly considered. We use Antarctic surface mass balance syntheses, along with ground-truthing of satellite data by airborne radar surveys to produce all-of-Antarctica maps of surface roughness, age at specified depth, elevation and displacement change, and surface air temperature correlations to pinpoint promising locations. We also use the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecast ERA 20th Century reanalysis (ERA-20C) to ensure that a site complementary to the Law Dome record is selected. We find three promising sites in the Indian Ocean sector of East Antarctica in the coastal zone from Enderby Land to the Ingrid Christensen Coast (50–100° E). Although we focus on East Antarctica for a new ice core site, the methodology is more generally applicable, and we include key parameters for all of Antarctica which may be useful for ice core site selection elsewhere and/or for other purposes.
Start Date: 03-2015
End Date: 12-2019
Amount: $320,094.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityStart Date: 02-2024
End Date: 01-2030
Amount: $35,000,000.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityStart Date: 08-2017
End Date: 12-2024
Amount: $30,050,000.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityStart Date: 06-2016
End Date: 10-2020
Amount: $387,041.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded Activity