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Talk Abstracts
Seminar Session: AMOS/CSIRO May 2012
Margi Boehm and Tony Bartlett
Wind, Trees, Fire and Houses - What happens when the Forest wags the Atmosphere's tail.
Tony Bartlett: "Wind, Fire and Houses – Lessons from the 2003 Canberra fires"
Tony Bartlett is the Forestry Research Program Manager with the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR). In this role he manages a program of forest research projects involving Australian and developing country partners aimed at improving livelihoods through sustainable forestry. He has worked as a forester for more than 35 years and was the Director of ACT Forests at the time of the 2003 Canberra fires. He has conducted research into the impacts of plantation management, buffer width and house losses under conditions of catostrophic fire danger. He has a Master of Science from Oxford University and a Degree in Forest Science from the University of Melbourne and is currently undertaking a part time PhD at the ANU.
Margi Boehm: "Wind Tunnel Analysis of 3D Fine Scale Momentum Adjustment Across and Downwind of a Forest Edge"
Seminar Session: AMOS/CSIRO March 2012
Greg Holland and Cindy Bruyere
National Center for Atmospheric Research
Boulder, Colorado, USA
When did Climate Change Become Observable? And What is the Impact on Weather Extremes?
Societal vulnerability to weather arises largely from relatively rare events at the extremes of the spectrum. Such high-impact weather includes: extended droughts, heat waves, major hurricanes, extreme local rainfall and snowfall, ice storms, European wind storms, and severe local storms and tornadoes. Perhaps somewhat paradoxically, our vulnerability to property loss and societal disruption is increasing as society becomes more complex and interconnected, and as private, industrial and commercial development expands in high risk areas. Understanding and predicting variations and changes in weather extremes is thus a major societal issue, encompassing urban commercial and industrial planning, watershed maintenance and design, insurance types and premiums, and government policy.
In this presentation we first examine the difficulties of differentiating climate change from variability and the question of when observable human-induced climate change commenced. We then discuss the use of extreme value theory to objectively assess the intensity and frequency of extreme events from climate simulations that are necessarily truncated by inadequate model resolution. These two themes lead to the suggestion that weather extremes respond strongly to climate variability and change and, somewhat non-intuitively, that such variability and change is best interpreted through weather extremes.
Seminar Session: Oceanography 17-October-2011
Sea-Level Change and Flooding Events
A major effect of climate change is a present and continuing increase in sea level, caused mainly by thermal expansion of seawater and the addition of water to the oceans from melted land ice. The present rate of global-average sea-level rise is about 3.2 mm/year. At the time of Fourth Assessment Report
(AR4)of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007, sea level was projected to rise at a maximum rate of about 10 mm/year and to a maximum level of about 0.8 m (relative to 1990) by the last decade of the 21st century, in the absence of significant mitigation of greenhouse-gas emissions. However, since the AR4, there has been considerable debate about whether these projections are
underestimates.
Sea-level rise, like the change of many other climate variables, will be expressed mainly as an increase in the frequency or likelihood (probability) of extreme events, rather than simply as a steady increase in an otherwise constant state. One of the most obvious adaptations to sea-level rise is to raise infrastructure by a sufficient amount so that flooding events occur no more often than they did prior to the sea-level rise. The selection of such an allowance has often, unfortunately, been quite subjective and qualitative, involving concepts such as `plausible' or `high-end' projections.
This talk will describe a simple technique for estimating an allowance for sea-level rise using elementary extreme-value theory. This allowance ensures that the expected, or average, number of extreme events in a given period is conserved. In other words, any infrastructure raised by this allowance would experience the same frequency of extreme events under sea-level rise as it would without the allowance and without sea-level rise.
Science Week Workshop: A Warming Earth - What the cost of doing nothing?
Pep Canadell (CSIRO) 'What we know about global warming'
Click here to view Pep's presentation
Pep Canadell is a Research Scientist at CSIRO Marine and Atmosphere Research and the Executive Director of the Global Carbon Project, an international joint program of the Earth System Science Partnership. Pep will talk about what we know about global warming and the idea that recent global warming is a consequence of human activity. Present evidence from recent measurements and the distant past to support the arguments. How is global warming linked to climate change? A big picture introduction.
Janette Lindesay (ANU) 'Changes to symbiotic climate in Australia'
Click here to view Janette's presentation
Janette Lindesay is Deputy Director ANU Fenner School of Environment and Society. Janette will explore the global picture of climate changes, and then more specifically address the changes in synoptic climate in Australia. What is climate change? Talk about the evidence that we have that climate is changing and how these changes can be related back to global warming.
Neville Nicholls (Monash University) 'Extreme events'
Neville Nicholls is lecturer at Monash University, and was lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. Neville explores the Australian situation regarding extreme weather events and what evidence do we have to suggest links between these, global warming and climate change.
Will Steffen (ANU) 'Coping with Climate Change'
Click here to view Will's presentation
Will Steffen is Executive Director of the ANU Climate Change Initiative. Will discusses how Australia’s ecosystems are expected to cope with changing climate and how this may be different compared to ecosystems in other parts of the world. He will look at how we can mitigate the effect of global warming and climate change on living organisms in Australia. Should we mitigate or do we let nature evolve to changes in the current environment?
Edward Blakely (University of Sydney) 'Impacts on Communities'
Click here to view Edward's presentation
Edward Blakely is Honorary Professor of Urban Policy at the US Studies Centre, University of Sydney. Prof Blakely will discuss the impacts that extreme events have on communities including long term effects and those effects that insurance monies cannot mitigate. How do communities build resilience to global warming and climate change? Is it just about building codes and insurance? What can communities do to protect themselves?
Anna Maria Arabia (Science & Technology Australia) ‘Research Utilisation – processes and challenges of integrating science and policy’.
Click here to view Anna's presentation
Anna Maria Blakely is Chief Executive Officer for Science & Technology Australia (previously known as Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies). She has extensive experience working with politicians and scientists to facilitate research utilisation through the Science Meet Parliament program. Ms. Arabia will share her experiences with us on the processes and challenges facing both scientists and politicians in the development of evidence based policy.
Seminar Session: Climate and Agriculture 21-July-2011
Dr Steven Crimp, CSIRO Ecosystems Sciences
Food security in a variable and changing climate
History has demonstrated that natural resource based industries, such as agriculture, are particularly sensitive to climate with yields highly responsive to climate variations. Climate change as well as growing water and land scarcity are projected to increasingly constrain growth in global food production and thus adversely impacting food security. A number of recent published studies suggest that climate change could result in between 5 million and 170 million additional people at risk of hunger by 2080 (depending on the future extent of change and assumed socio-economic development).
Studies in Australia have shown that climate change will interact with population changes and increasing patterns of wheat consumption to strongly reduce wheat surplus for export. Sampling across the full range of future climate, population and consumption projections, there is a 50% chance of having only a small surplus of 2.5Mt/year and a 26% chance of Australia being a net importer of 15Mt/year by 2070.
The talk will highlight future food security challenges both at the global and regional scales and examine adaptation as a means of mitigating some of these impacts.
Water intelligence for decision makers - The Bureau of Meteorology's role in the water resource management of the MDB
In 2007 the Bureau of Meteorology was given a water information role by the Federal Government with the objective of providing governments, industry and the community with relevant, accurate and timely information on the status of and forecasts for Australia's water resources to enable better informed decisions. This talk with outline and highlight some of the products and services that have been developed to assist water resources managers with particular reference to the Murray Darling Basin.
Seminar Session: Paleaeoclimate 26-May-2011
Professor Patrick DeDeckker RSES, ANU
The importance of historical and prehistorical archives of environmental change: Australian examples from both on the land and at sea
Archives of environmental variability are to provide us with the necessary information to decipher trends, possible cycles and rates, as well as amplitudes, of climatic change.
The instrumental record and historical archives in Australia are far too short to provide the necessary information we require. Thus, we need to rely on natural archives that span from decades to centuries, and going back as far as a few millennia.
Several achives have already been exploited such as tree rings, coral skeletons, lake sedimentary records, and now from the open ocean.
This talk will present the advantages and disadvantages of using such ‘natural’ archives, including their level of resolution.
Examples of such archives will be presented. It will be pointed out, as well, that there is an obvious lack of interest among environmental managers, town planners and others with respect to consulting those natural archives. Presented example will deal with the building of an airport on ancient storm or cyclone surge deposits in Queensland, allowing habitation in obvious meander flats of large rivers in several towns in NSW, a highway on the shore deposits of a lake that has a documented history of high lake levels near Canberra.
Oceanic temperatures are said to be increasing in our region but when did this change did commence, we do not know. The palaeo record should inform on this important question and we will brief you on our current research on this topic.
