Our Research
Guided by the wide-ranging expertise and needs for climate information in our partner cohort, we co-design and co-execute research projects with direct outcomes and outputs of relevance to our partners, and through them, the wider Australian community.
The outcomes of our Centre are firmly focused on Australia. However, our research, like the climate system, is global. The Centre’s unique and transformational approaches will provide Australian leadership in the international weather and climate science communities. We will build a firm understanding of the past, present and future of our nation’s weather resources through a research centre with deep industry and government partnerships that integrates advances in meteorology, oceanography, data science, machine learning and high-performance computing. This will provide Australian businesses with a competitive advantage and enable governments at all levels to make communities resilient to weather change.
Our Research is designed around six team-based Centre Projects, each with interconnected activities that cross traditional institutional and disciplinary boundaries.
Centre Project: Weather System Dynamics
Weather systems are the building blocks of our weather and climate. This project aims to develop and apply innovative ways to identify and characterise weather systems, evaluate their representation in models, and assess mechanisms that underpin their potential changes in a warmer climate. Deeply rooted in our dynamical understanding of the atmosphere and its coupling to the ocean and the land, the work in this program will provide the foundation for our understanding how weather systems shape our current and future surface weather and how they interact with climate variability and change.
Centre Project: Climate Variability and Weather Systems
Australia’s weather is strongly affected by large-scale modes of climate variability such as El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) and Southern Annular Mode (SAM). This project will seek to identify the mechanisms linking modes of climate variability to weather regimes. Results will help us understand the two-way feedbacks between weather regimes and climate variability and to assess and interpret the relationships between climate variability and weather regimes in climate models.
Centre Project: Weather Systems in a Warmer World
As the Earth System warms, the circulation of the oceans and atmosphere will change, and so too will the weather systems they interact with. The exact nature of weather system change is determined by a complex interplay of
thermodynamic factors, changes in the surface conditions and changes in the major modes of climate variability. All three are themselves strongly affected by weather systems, creating a system with strong non-linear feedbacks. This project will consider the interplay of weather systems and global warming processes to identify the mechanisms that underpin weather system change, providing a solid foundation for estimates of their future behaviour.
Centre Project: Weather Resources
Weather provides significant opportunities and resources for society and our transition towards lower carbon emissions. The Weather Resources project will seek to identify, map and quantify weather resources across the continent. To do this, we will define methodologies for characterising and analysing weather resources and source and develop datasets appropriate for assessing weather resources. A strong focus of this project will be on translating weather resource information into useful tools and knowledge for government and industry to improve scientifically informed decision making.
Centre Project: High Impact Weather
This project aims to understand weather risks to key resources in a changing and variable climate. To do this we will explore the effect of diverse plausible changes in climate variability to determine the distribution of future possible weather states and associated weather risk profile. We will also carry out interrelated research activities in areas such as heatwaves on land and in the marine environment and on future changes in short duration precipitation extremes.
Centre Project: Modelling Science
Improving the models we work with is fundamental to improving our ability to predict and understand future weather change. We’ll build a team of model developers with expertise in ocean, land, and atmospheric modelling. The team will provide foundational expertise on the model components and the coupled system to all other projects. In addition to this we’ll apply our expertise and improved modelling capability to examine how sea breezes may be relevant to wind power generation. We’ll also conduct research into large-scale influence of fine-scale processes using global models. i.e. how increasing resolution may impact weather-climate interactions.
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