The ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science
Fri, Aug 13 2010

In July, the Australian Research Council announced a suite of new Centres of Excellence – one of these was the Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science. Centres of Excellence are major national research hubs within the University sector.

The ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science is led by the University of New South Wales in partnership with Monash University, The Australian National University, The University of Melbourne and the University of Tasmania. It is partnered nationally with the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO, along with the National Computational Infrastructure that provides nationally significant supercomputing. Internationally, links include the Hadley Centre, GFDL, NCAR, NASA and LMD. The Centre is also linked to the Federal Departmentof Climate Change and Energy Efficiency to ensure our research aligns with other major research providers.

The focus on the centre is process-level climate system science – so this includes the mathematics, physics and biology of the climate system integrated via information technology. The Centre is about investing in the science and software development required to regionalize climate models – to enhance their skill to provide better skill in regional projection. This involves sciencethemes around large-scale models of variability, around regional-scale phenomenon including the parameterization of convection and land surface processes and around extremes, and the detection and attribution of extremes.

The Centre is funded for 7 years from January 2011. We will be able to offer alarge number of PhD scholarships, honours scholarships, postdoctoral research positions and some more senior appointments and research will be designed to link with colleagues at CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology and our international partners.

Further details can be obtained via Andy Pitman, the Centre Director, ata.pitman@unsw.edu.au.