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 five major projects, each with interconnected activities that cross traditional institutional and disciplinary boundaries.
Project 1: Weather Systems and Climate Variability
This project aims to identify and better understand weather system characteristics and how they are represented in models. We will explore how sea surface temperature variability – such as different phases of ENSO – affect weather systems and how this might translate into weather resources and/or high impact events. Another activity within the project will examine Modes of Variability and tropical weather systems. We’re also interested in the interactions between tropical and extratropical cyclones.
Project 2: Weather Systems in a Warmer World
Topics that this project will examine include: Pacific warming patterns, weather systems and Australian weather; Ocean and atmospheric mesoscale systems in a warmer world; and The future of warm and wet conditions (both in the air and on the ground). To drive research across these activities we will answer questions about the relative roles of the atmosphere and ocean and their coupling in setting the different warming patterns. We’ll explore How ocean and atmosphere mesoscale system tracks and intensities change in a warming world. And we’ll look at the relative roles of dynamic and thermodynamic processes that contribute to warm and wet conditions.
Project 3: 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.
Project 4: High Impact Events
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.
Project 5: Modelling and its application to fine-scale coupling and upscale effects
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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