BAMOS June 2017
6
News
CLEx has landed
Alvin Stone, Media and Communications Manager, ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science
On July 1, the new ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes( CLEx) comes into existence with funding for seven years. The Centre, the first of its kind to focus solely on climate extremes, will be led by Prof Andy Pitman.
The Australian Research Council( ARC) is investing $ 30 million in the centre with significant cash and in-kind contributions from university, government and industry partners.
The focus of the new centre will be to gain a far more sophisticated understanding of the behaviour of climate extremes that directly affect Australia’ s natural and economic systems. The Centre seeks to take this understanding and build it into the modelling systems used to simulate our weather and climate.
While it is a new Centre, CLEx builds on the work of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science( ARCCSS) and focuses it on high impact extreme events.
The overall aim of CLEx is to transform our understanding of past and present climate extremes and to revolutionise the capability to protect against them into the future.
To accomplish this the Centre has four primary research programs. These are:
• Extreme rainfall: This has four sub-programs that together aim to improve the prediction of extreme rainfall by making fundamental advances in understanding the processes and translating this into our climate models.
• Heat waves and cold air outbreaks: The aim of this research area is to explain the physical mechanisms that control the frequency, intensity and duration of heat waves and cold air outbreaks in Australia to improve the skill of models in this area.
• Drought: Using the Millennium Drought as a key test case, this research program aims to explore the mechanisms that control the frequency, duration and intensity of droughts in Australia.
• Climate variability and teleconnections: Recognising that regional extremes can be profoundly influenced by teleconnections, climate sensitivity and variability in the ocean-atmosphere, this research program aims to examine how extremes are related to these areas and can be modulated by them.
As with the ARCCSS, the new Centre will be led by the University of New South Wales, partnering with the University of Melbourne, Monash University, Australian National University and the University of Tasmania. It will also work closely with other national and international partners to achieve its aims.
Our national partners include the Bureau of Meteorology, CSIRO, National Computational Infrastructure, Risk Frontiers, the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage, and the Managing Climate Variability Program. We also plan to have strong links with two National Environmental Science Programs— the Earth System and Climate Change Hub and the Clean Air and Urban Landscapes Hub.
Internationally, the new Centre will continue the strong relationships developed through ARCCSS with the UK Met Office, NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, ETH Zurich, NCAR, the University of Arizona and the Max Planck Institute.
As the wide breadth of partnerships indicate, Centres of Excellence are the ARC’ s flagship research investment. Performing cutting edge research is of course a given but it also requires the right support. CLEx builds on the success of ARCCSS by again resourcing a strong computational modelling support( CMS) team.
In ARCCSS this team streamlined processes around modelling of the climate and datasets while applying its expertise to issues that affect the entire Australian climate community. It has saved ARCCSS researchers months of preparatory work, accelerated training of PhD students and allowed researchers to devote more time to research by reducing the time to set up