News and updates

SLWCE Feature Article

Rogue Waves off the Tasmanian Coast: A Rare Event or Unnoticed Giants of the Southern Ocean?

Cagil looked into the extreme (rogue) wave events captured by the Cape Sorell wave buoy observations in late August to early September 2024 and provided insights into the Physics of how rogue waves could form given the right conditions.

This article comes as another great read after Salman and co. also published a related news article on the IMOS OceanCurrent also featuring integrated in-situ wave observations on the Surface Waves visualisation tool.

New Canute update, new starter and new leaders

Canute has had another update! In response to co-design with NESP knowledge brokers, Canute3 has been updated to provide a summary page which provides plain English explanations of the elementary water level data Canute can provide. Additionally, the tide gauge records (GESLA3) have been updated, adding an additional 10 years of data, and for twice as many locations around Australia.

We welcome new starter Bryan Hally to the team this month, growing our capability with his addition of coastal & marine geospatial analytics.

Leadership in CSIRO is not a one way career trajectory, and in the last few months, Kathy has stepped down as Group Leader of High Resolution Climate, Ocean and Extremes and we welcome Edward King, formerly of SLWRS team, into the Group leadership role. Ron Hoeke’s term as SLWCE/CEMP team leader also came to an end, and Claire Trenham has stepped into this role.

Growing teams

Over the last year we have welcomed an additional 4 new starters into the team:
Marites (Tess) Canto, Tim Lesson, Alberto Meucci, and welcome back Emilio Echevarria as a CERC+ postdoc. Read about what they each bring to the team on our About Us page!

With the creation of the Environment Business Unit in CSIRO, bringing together staff from Oceans & Atmosphere and Land & Water, our large team has split into two teams: Sea Level, Waves & Remote Sensing, lead by Xuebin Zhang, and Coastal Extremes Modelling & Projections lead by Ron Hoeke.

Canute updated!

An updated version of the Canute3 sea level tool is now available supporting new features in response to user feedback – this update includes future wave projections.

CSIRO blog: spits and shoals

Julian has written a CSIRO blog on coastal erosion and the splitting of Bribie Island

New starter: Cagil Kirezci

Cagil joins our team as a coastal modeller who will be focussing on implementing wave coupling together with our colleagues in the COR programme.

Spotter buoys deployed in WA

We have deployed 4 Sofar spotter buoys to measure wave characteristics off the coast of Mandurah (south of Perth), WA. Live data from these buoys can be seen on our coastal extremes data page.

New sea level rise estimates

Kewei, Xuebin and affiliate John Church have published a paper in Nature Climate Change on new sea level rise estimates, together with a piece in The Conversation explaining it.

New extremes code released

We have released publicly available code to calculate extreme wave heights, and potential wind fetch at a coastal location. See our coastal extremes tools page for links.

Canute 3.1 released

An updated version of the Canute sea level tool incorporating beach wave setup has been released.

Nature Scientific Data paper published

CSIRO-affiliated student Joao Morim has lead a Scientific Data paper on the dataset associated with the Nature Climate Change article, Claire and Mark are coauthors. Claire also wrote a Nature Behind the Paper blog post about the dataset.

Nature Climate Change paper published

CSIRO-affiliated student Joao Morim has lead a Nature paper on the projected changes in coastal wave climate, with Mark and Claire co-authors. See Mark’s The Conversation article about the work.

New starter: Blake Seers

Dr Blake Seers has joined our team. Blake comes to us from the University of Auckland, and is working with us as a scientific programmer.

Conversation Curious Kids piece

Mark has written a piece for The Conversation’s Curious Kids series on why are there waves?, also appearing in the Imagine This podcast.

NESP ESCC Hub webinar

Julian gave the March ESCC Hub webinar on “Understanding future extreme sea levels – tools and information to support coastal management“ (links to webinar recording).

New-look website released!

This website is now available, and replaces http://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/sl_about_us.html. We hope you like the new look and expanded content.

Oceans book released

CSIRO has published an Oceans book about Australia’s marine and coastal research, which Kathy McInnes and a number of our colleagues were involved in. Kathy appeared on ABC News Breakfast as part of the launch! Information and access to the book can be found here.

Citizen science project – tide gauge digitization

Kathy McInnes, assisted by Claire Trenham, is coordinating a citizen science project to digitise tide gauge data from around Australia, starting with Williamstown (Melbourne). This project was included at a citizen science day run by AMOS in August, and featured by the NESP Earth Systems & Climate Change Hub newsletter in September. For more information including how to get involved, see the NESP article.

WCRP Grand Challenge for Sea Level Rise

In early July, the World Climate Research Program Grand Challenge for Sea Level Rise organised a conference in New York. Some of our work was presented there by Kathy McInnes. Following the science presented at the conference, a statement has been published and can be viewed here.

Sea Level, Waves & Coastal Extremes team members in the media!

In the last month Xuebin Zhang authored a paper published in Nature Climate Change, and Kathy McInnes was featured by Australian Women’s Weekly in a piece about female scientists leading the way in renewable energy science in Australia. Find her on p.94 of the August 2017 edition!

New Research Centre Launched

The Centre for Southern Hemisphere Oceans Research (CSHOR, or “sea shore”) has been launched in Hobart. CSHOR is a long-term research collaboration between Qingdao National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology (QNLM) in China and CSIRO, together with UNSW and UTas. Dr Xuebin Zhang leads a project to study the role of the Southern Ocean in sea-level change.

For more information, see blogs.csiro.au/ecos/cshor/.

New staff: Claire Trenham

Claire Trenham joins the team. Claire comes to us from managing Research Data and Services at the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI). Previously Claire was a member of this team working with Mark Hemer in Hobart running WaveWatchIII and analysing wave data for various projects. Claire will be working in Aspendale with Kathy, Ron and Mark, as well as Michael Grose and Marcus Thatcher in the climate modelling realm.