Session 8. Compound events – characteristics, drivers, and impacts
Convenors: Dr Cassandra Rogers, Dr Elisabeth Vogel, Dr Nina Nadine Ridder, Dr Doug Richardson
Session Description
Extreme weather events, including heatwaves, floods, and droughts, pose risks to human health, ecosystems,
infrastructure, and the economy. Compound events, which involve the interaction of multiple climate extremes
and/or drivers or consecutively occurring extremes, can be substantially more impactful. A recent example is
the Black Summer bushfires (2019/20) when multiple large wildfires burned concurrently across Australia,
posing significant challenges for emergency management. Research into these types of events, including
analysing historical and future changes, associated drivers, impacts on critical sectors (including agriculture,
water resources management, energy, or transport), and multi-hazard warning systems, is crucial to increase
resilience. In this session, we invite the submission of abstracts on any topic that broadly sits within compound
events research. Of particular interest are submissions relating to experiences in assessing, providing warnings,
or responding to compound events in industry or an operational context, including the insurance sector,
emergency management, infrastructure, or decision-making in policy.
22. Understanding drought processes and impacts
Convenors: Camille Mora, Anjana Devanand, Scott Power
Session Description
Droughts are a multifaceted climate extreme driven by the large-scale and regional ocean, atmosphere, and land processes. Most droughts typically start as a rainfall deficit, which may be exacerbated by atmospheric evaporative demand and propagate to drying in other surface water cycle and vegetation components. Droughts significantly impact agriculture, which can cascade through the economy through food supply chains and contribute to other extremes, including bushfire development and declining water security. This multidisciplinary session invites abstracts aimed at improving our understanding of past, present, and future droughts. We especially welcome abstracts that study:
• Processes that initiate, sustain or end droughts
• Monitoring, prediction or projections of droughts
• Modelling of socioeconomic impacts of droughts
• Cascading impacts of droughts on the Australian economy
• The impact of drought on national and international food security
• Communicating the science of drought processes and impacts to policymakers
Conference: 30th AMOS National Conference
Where/when: Hyatt Hotel, Canberra, 5-9 February 2024
Submissions close: 1 September 2023.
Session: Severe thunderstorms: processes, prediction, impacts, and changes
Convenors: Tim Raupach (UNSW), Rob Warren (BoM), Harald Richter (BoM), and Salomé Hussein (Risk Frontiers)
Session description:
Severe convective storms cause significant damage every year in Australia and around the world, with impacts from extreme wind gusts, large hail, and heavy rainfall that can lead to flash flooding. Knowledge gaps exist concerning the physical processes governing these hazards, their relationship to the large-scale atmospheric environment, and past and projected changes in their frequency and severity. The need for more accurate, timely and user-oriented forecasts and warnings of convective hazards also necessitates advances in high-resolution modelling and remote sensing, as well as a better understanding of the links between these hazards and their impacts. In this session we welcome contributions dealing with the latest thunderstorm research, including process understanding, prediction of thunderstorms and associated hazards, storm impacts on assets and society, and the changing nature of thunderstorms in a warming climate. Interdisciplinary work that crosses between research and industry is encouraged.
31. Machine Learning for Climate Change Adaptation: Insights, Innovations, and Applications
Advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) open up a myriad of new opportunities for climate change adaptation, resilience-building, and sustainability development. This session aims to bring together researchers and practitioners to share their findings, insights, and experiences in harnessing AI to support climate change research and facilitate mitigation, adaptation, and transformation across various societal sectors, including agriculture, industry, energy, climate security, and climate equity.
We invite contributions on various topics related to AI and climate change adaptation, such as::
• AI integration for Improving weather and climate models and their parameterisations.
• Enhancing the detection and forecasting of climate extremes and hazards through AI,
• Harnessing the power of AI to generate robust and practical datasets, enabling climate adaptation research, including empirical downscaling.
• Exploring AI solutions for reducing or sequestering greenhouse gas emissions.
• Establishing comprehensive frameworks for the development, deployment, and evaluation of AI-driven climate solutions.
Furthermore, we encourage research that utilises innovative statistical methods to investigate climate adaptation strategies and inform decision-making.
Session Organisers:
Neelesh Rampal – NIWA NZ, University of New South Wales
Yawen Shao – University of Melbourne
Sanaa Hobeichi – University of New South Wales
Abhnil Prasad – University of New South Wales
Contact Sanaa: s.hobeichi@unsw.edu.au
Title: Tropical climate variability: dynamics, teleconnections, and change
Convenors: Peter van Rensch, Yann Planton, Andréa Taschetto, Shayne McGregor, Dietmar Dommenget, Christine Chung
Session Description:
The tropical oceans play a fundamental role in driving regional and global climate variability. Prominent climate phenomena in all three tropical ocean basins, such as the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Madden-Julian Oscillation, influence weather patterns, rainfall and temperature over countless populated areas and regions vital for food security.
While new scientific understanding has accumulated in recent decades, there is still progress to be made in several aspects, including the physical processes controlling ENSO diversity and multi-year ENSO events, the disparity between the observed and modelled tropical Pacific surface temperature trends, the mechanisms of tropical ocean basin interactions, the teleconnections of combined climate phenomena, the processes that affect regional weather and local impacts, to name a few.
This session invites contributions of studies that address the dynamics, teleconnections and change of tropical variability, in the past, present and future climate.
Contact Peter: peter.vanrensch@monash.edu
Atmospheric Dynamics of Climate and Extreme Weather
Convenors
Dr Zoe Gillett, Dr Martin Jucker, Dr Irina Rudeva
Session Description
Atmospheric dynamics is all about understanding the fundamental physical processes which bring us our daily weather and determine the climate. This session aims to bring together the Australian atmospheric dynamics community. We welcome contributions from all fields in weather and climate science where atmospheric dynamics plays a major role. Examples include extreme weather events, atmospheric teleconnections, regional climate variability, mesoscale dynamics, uncertainties in future projections and interactions across scales. Observation based studies, climate simulations, numerical weather prediction model and idealised experiments are all welcome.