AMOS 2021 Round-Up

The annual Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (AMOS) 2021 online conference brought together leading experts in meteorology, oceanography, climate and other related sciences to focus on the latest research in February. Several DCFP staff presented their work at this conference and details of some of our staff’s presentations are included below:

Amanda Black presented results from her analysis of a control simulation of the Climate re-analysis Forecast Ensemble system (CAFE60v1), run for 600 years, to investigate key dynamics of ocean-atmosphere coupling. Archetypal analysis (AA) was used to find “archetypes”, or extreme data values, of global sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies from the model.

Ian Watterson presented two topics to the conference. For ‘Regional climate projections and applications’ session, Ian spoke on ‘Present and future Australian climates simulated by CCAM and downscaling six CMIP5 models to 12 km’, with co-authors Marcus Thatcher, and Tony Rafter.

During the ‘Tropical climate variability: dynamics, teleconnections and impacts’ session, Ian also presented a poster addressing ‘How Variable is Australia’s Climate?’.

James Risbey presented ‘Fair assessment of climate forecasts’; based on work completed with many of his DCFP colleagues, on differences between hindcast and forecast skill. James outlined how he and his colleagues showed how the bias correction process can lead to overestimates of skill in hindcasts if it is applied across the period where skill is assessed.  The research related to differences in hindcast and forecast skill to changes in the climatology of model biases over the hindcast period.  James noted that it is important to treat all forecasts consistently and that raw forecast outputs should be provided to facilitate this.

Doug Richardson presented his research on shifts in extreme fire weather. He showed that in the late 1990s, parts of southeast Australia underwent a step change towards more extreme fire weather days. Doug demonstrated that these changes accord with changes in actual fires, and are partly attributable to changes in temperature, humidity, and the large-scale atmospheric circulation.

Dougie Squire presented the results of a study to estimate the likelihoods of concurrent unprecedented drought and fire weather in Australia. The work utilises the DCFP’s very large ensemble decadal forecasts to reduce uncertainties in estimating likelihoods of concurrent extremes.

You can read more about the AMOS conference here.