Masterclass in 21st Century Weather
This event has concluded. If you wish to access a recording of the sessions, please contact Lucía Gamarra Cuba.
Extreme rainfall, heatwaves, droughts and fire weather are high-impact weather events that pose significant risks to communities, infrastructure, and ecosystems across Australia. Our changing exposure and vulnerability to high-impact weather events have profound implications for the national adaptation plan and climate risk disclosures. Despite often being connected to climate change and various modes of climate variability, such as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation and Indian Ocean Dipole, high-impact weather at the surface is primarily driven by weather systems.
Through interactive lectures and panel sessions, 21st Century Weather experts will illustrate the critical importance of understanding the weather systems driving high-impact weather events, as well as the weather resources—water, solar irradiance and wind—and how weather change is a key issue affecting these resources.
We will examine why climate change is, in fact, a form of weather change, why high-impact climate events are, in reality, weather events, and discuss the strengths and limitations of climate models in simulating weather change. We will also explore our partnerships with government and industry, and identify the weather systems that drive weather resources and high-impact weather events.
Where: UNSW’s Law Theatre, Sydney
When: Tuesday 2 September from 9:30am to 5:00pm.
Register here. Attendance is free of charge.
Masterclass Agenda
10:00 – Lecture | Climate change is weather change – why should you care?
Professor Christian Jakob, Director and Chief Investigator of 21st Century Weather, will detail the reasons why 21st Century Weather is looking at climate change through a weather change lens. He will explain how fundamental science can elucidate the critical connection between weather, climate variability and climate change to make mitigation and adaptation decisions across all sectors of industry and government.
10:45 – Panel | Forging Partnerships for Impact
Moderated by Lucía Gamarra, 21st Century Weather Government and Industry Liaison, this panel will describe the journey of 21st Century Weather’s partnerships and its imperative to engage closely with support government and industry. Partners Tom Mortlock from AON, Earl Duran from Diagno Energy, Damon Tweedie from EnergyAustralia will join Associate Professor Ailie Gallant, 21st Century Weather Chief Investigator, in the journey of discovering how we have worked together to shape and refine our research goals, and build a common language to understand and help one another.
11:45 – Morning tea
12:15 – Lecture | The critical connection between high impact events and weather systems
Dr Kim Reid and Dr Michael Barnes, 21st Century Weather Research Fellows, will demonstrate, through several examples of high impact weather over Australia, the fundamental role that weather systems played in them. They will discuss why understanding the physics and dynamics of weather systems is central to our knowledge of high impact weather and our understanding of how these events, and weather more generally, may change in a warmer world.
13:30 – Lunch
14:30 – Lecture | Modelling weather change to help decision making – What’s the big deal?
Dr Yi Huang, 21st Century Weather Chief Investigator, will provide an overview of how we observe and model weather and climate, what current models can realistically predict, where the limitations lie, and why. She will cover key advances in data sources, model development to date and the scientific and computational advances needed to improve the usefulness of model outputs for long-term planning, risk assessment, and policy design.
15:30 – Afternoon tea
16:00 – Panel | Two sides of the same coin: Weather Systems from High-Impact to Resources
Moderated by Associate Professor Ailie Gallant, 21st Century Weather Deputy Director (Partnerships) and Chief Investigator, this panel will cover how the Centre’s science is rethinking climate-scale problems by taking a weather-scale approach. 21st Century Weather Research Fellows, Dr Chiara Holgate, Dr Ellie Ong, Dr Kim Reid, and Dr Leena Khadke, will describe their work in understanding and predicting the weather systems that drive high-impact weather and weather resources. We will cover the applications to water supply and hydropower, the energy sector, transport and aviation, and disaster risk reduction.
Why should you and your team attend?
To better understand that key impacts of climate change are realised through weather events, and to learn that almost every high-impact event is a weather event and how they work.
Whether you are working on strategic planning, risk management, climate-related risk disclosure, or product and service delivery, the weather touches everything – and it is changing! You will learn that understanding these changes requires us to dare looking up and understanding the weather throughout the entire atmosphere.
This Masterclass will help you deepen your knowledge and understanding of weather and climate science, which you can apply to inform resilience, adaptation and investments.
Register here. Attendance is free of charge.