Good streamflow forecasts allow water management agencies to make better decisions and achieve more efficient water use. Currently, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology provides seasonal forecasts of three-month-total streamflow for over 200 gauging stations around Australia. Forecast users, particularly water management […]
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NCI is Australia’s most highly integrated, high-performance research computing environment, built to deliver on national priorities and research excellence across the scientific disciplines. Supporting over 4,000 researchers using the facility, NCI is committed to training new users to […]
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Six years ago, a catastrophic flood unfolded in the Lockyer Valley in southeast Queensland. The floodwaters then spread on January 11 2011 across the Brisbane River floodplains, inundating the Brisbane CBD and inner suburbs, and bringing the state’s […]
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The Queensland Government’s Drought Relief Assistance Scheme (DRAS) has provided record levels of subsidy to the state’s livestock industry in the past three years. Drought subsidies of $85 million were approved by the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries […]
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For Australia’s climate, 2016 was a year of two halves. The year started with one of the strongest El Niño events on record in place in the Pacific Ocean, and the opening months of 2016 were generally hot […]
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Australia’s ski season could shrink by up to 80 days a year by 2050 under worst-case predictions for climate change — but there are no plans to restrict ski resorts in national parks. Key points: CSIRO predicts average […]
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National water agencies will receive secure funding into the future, as part of the Federal Government’s mid-year budget update. Operational funding for the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, Commonwealth Environmental Water Office, and water programs within the Bureau of Meteorology […]
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The number of waterbirds across eastern Australia’s wetlands hit another record low this year as dams and other projects in the Murray-Darling Basin undermined river health, a leading ecologist says. The 34th annual aerial survey counted 71,993 birds in as many as 2000 […]
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Climate change made some of Australia’s 2015 extreme weather events more likely, according to research published today in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. As part of an annual review of global weather extremes, these studies focused […]
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New Intensity–Frequency–Duration (IFD) design rainfall estimates have been released for use in flood estimation and water infrastructure design. IFDs are part of a suite of inputs used by engineers to design water infrastructure such as gutters, culverts, roofs, […]
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The annual review of extreme weather and climate events published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society today highlights how climate change is influencing the events that affect us the most. This table summarises each event and […]
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The recently released National Environmental Monitoring Sites Register (NEMSR) brings together a diverse range of Australian environmental monitoring networks in one database and on an interactive map. The NEMSR currently includes rainfall radars, long-term weather observation sites, seismic […]
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Back in 2010-11 Australia “greened”, as record-breaking rains triggered a boom in plant growth that removed huge amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and stored it as carbon in the landscape. But what happened after that? Our […]
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Since 1950 many places across Australia have experienced significant decreasing streamflow trends and these places are mostly located in the southeast and southwest of the country. These recent findings, published in the journal Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, […]
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Fire has been a driving force across Australia for millennia. Indeed, the health of many of our ecosystems is intrinsically dependent on fire. But bushfires are also one of our most frequent natural hazards, with a total […]
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Australia is no stranger to heatwaves. Each summer, large areas of the continent fry under intense heat for days on end, causing power outages, public transport delays, and severe impacts to human health. The estimated impact on our […]
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Whenever droughts occur in Australia, our ability to monitor, attribute, forecast and manage them is shown to be insufficient. That is the conclusion of a a new study by Australian researchers undertaken through OzEWEX, and published in the […]
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The Australian Water Resource Assessment Landscape (AWRA-L) Model is a 0.05° (approximately 5 km) gridded daily water balance model developed by CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology for Water Resource assessment purposes (see Hafeez et al., 2015; Viney et […]
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Recent floods in New South Wales, South Australia and Victoria have reminded us of the power of our weather and rivers to wreak havoc on homes, business and even, tragically, lives. The journal Climatic Change has published a […]
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Generation Y has grown up in a rapidly warming world. According to the US National Climate Data Centre, every month since February 1985 has seen above average global temperatures, compared with the twentieth century. I have no memories […]
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