The world’s climate is already changing. Extreme weather events (floods, droughts, and heatwaves) are increasing as global temperatures rise. While we are starting to learn how these changes will affect people and individual species, we don’t yet know […]
Read more
The CSIRO’s climate science divisions are expected to be pared back as part of a massive shake-up of the organisation. The ABC understands cuts are expected to be made within the Oceans and Atmosphere and Land and Water divisions […]
Read more
Australia’s rainfall is perhaps the most variable of any continent on Earth. When averaged across the country, rainfall in 2015 was only slightly below normal. However, there were large areas of both extreme dry and relative wet across […]
Read more
It’s official: 2015 was the hottest year on record. The US-based National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has confirmed overnight that 2015 saw the global average temperature climbing to 0.90°C above the 20th-century average of 13.9°C. The record has […]
Read more
A stocktake of waterbirds in eastern Australia has shown the lowest breeding level on record. The annual aerial survey, conducted by the Centre for Ecosystem Science at the University of NSW, confirmed a dramatic long-term decline in the […]
Read more
To start of 2016 on a positive note, HEPEX is happy to invite contributions to a special issue in HESS on sub-seasonal to seasonal hydrological forecasting. The special issue is a follow-up on the workshop in Norrköping in September […]
Read more
Drought has affected most regions of the globe in the early 21st-century. In Australia, the recent Millennium Drought from 2001 until 2009 was the worst on record and ended dramatically with one of the largest La Niña […]
Read more
Today the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has released its yearly climate update. A strong El Niño event was the headline story underlying global climate in 2015, but its impact in Australia was mixed. In some parts of the […]
Read more
Surface irrigation water demand in the northern Murray-Darling Basin can be better accounted when using remotely-sensed irrigation extent and rates of actual evapotranspiration in hydrologic modelling, both in terms of magnitude and temporal patterns. In their recent study […]
Read more
New research suggest that integrating satellite soil moisture observations into a simple land-surface model can improve the modelled root-zone soil moisture significantly. Evaporation determines the availability of surface water resources and the requirements for irrigation. In addition, through its impacts on […]
Read more
The coastal catchments of southeast Australia may be affected less by large-scale climatic drivers than previously assumed, according to recent research by Rafael Carvalho and colleagues from the University of Wollongong. The study looked at the spatial variation in rainfall for Shoalhaven […]
Read more
New research has found that linear trends in rainfall across Australia between 1981 and 2014 were largely attributable to El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD). The same study also found that both intra-annual and seasonal rainfall changes […]
Read more
This year is likely to be the world’s warmest year on record—probably by a substantial margin—according to theWorld Meteorological Organization’s preliminary global annual climate assessment. The assessment, released on 25 November, reported what has become increasingly apparent over […]
Read more
With many pressures on water resources around Australia, it’s important to take stock and assess water availability and use across the country. Water in Australia 2013–14 is our first assessment report to provide a national overview of climatic […]
Read more
A study has found more than 25 per cent of trees across 7000 hectares of jarrah forest in the Perth Hills, Western Australia have died after the drought and heatwaves experienced in 2010-11. Similar numbers of trees died […]
Read more
The Australian Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information, Geoscience Australia, CSIRO and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology have advised of the release of two significant reports that may be of interest: The value of Earth Observations from Space […]
Read more
Analysis of streamflow trends around Australia—using the Bureau’s Hydrologic Reference Stations —reveals just nine sites with an increasing annual streamflow trend, while 72 sites show a decreasing trend and the remaining sites show no trend. Decreasing trends were also found […]
Read more
The landscape water balance is the sum of the hydrological processes that keep water moving through a landscape—recharging groundwater, filling streams and flushing water through wetlands. This water balance also determines how much moisture is in the soil—a […]
Read more
Do you think it is better to pre-process the meteorological forecasts, to post-process the hydrological forecasts or to do both? Why? Following this blog about future directions for post-processing research, this challenge was mentioned in a comment by […]
Read more
The Millennium Drought ended more than five years ago, but several years of below-average rainfall and El Niño have brought drought back to many parts of Australia. Our latest report on water in Australia shows rainfall is continuing […]
Read more