BAMOS August 2025
18 Article
New book on Southern Hemisphere weather and climate unveiled at ICSHMO
Andréa S. Taschetto, University of New South Wales( a. taschetto @ unsw. edu. au)
Linden Ashcroft and Lily O ' Neil. Credit: Karen Kissane
Tercio Ambrizzi, Thando Ndarana and me at ICSHMO. Credit: Andréa Taschetto
The 14th International Conference on Southern Hemisphere Meteorology and Oceanography( ICSHMO), held in April in Cape Town, South Africa, featured a special session dedicated to the upcoming book Meteorology and Climate of the Southern Hemisphere.
Expected to be published later this year( or early next year) by Cambridge University Press, the book covers the weather systems that shape the regional climates of Australasia, South America, Africa and Antarctica.
It is an update to the 1998 edition by David Karoly and Dayton Vincent, published 27 years ago, and is co-edited by Thando Ndarana( University of Pretoria, South Africa), Tercio Ambrizzi( University of São Paulo, Brazil), and me.
As one of the editors of this new edition, I had the honour of presenting the motivation behind the project and sharing a bit of its journey.
So, what’ s new?
A lot, actually. The field has seen remarkable scientific progress over the past decades, brought about by advancements in observational technologies— new satellites, radars, and reanalysis products— and climate modelling. We now benefit from almost three decades of additional observations, finer spatial resolution models, better parameterisations, and new theoretical frameworks that have transformed our understanding of weather and climate systems in the Southern Hemisphere.