Tag: agriculture
RP3 Drought Report – December 2020
A major component of the research in the Drought program over the past four months has focused on the interface between real-world data and climate models. The aim of much of this research has been to improve how land surface models represent some of the key processes that influence the length, and severity of drought.
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Research brief: Future Australian drought could lead to high carbon releases
In this study, CLEX researchers and colleagues analysed the magnitude and sensitivity of vegetation responses to the Millennium Drought with satellite-derived information.
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PhD opportunity: Water, elevated CO2 and growth: plant ecophysiological responses in a Free Air CO2 Enrichment experiment
This project will involve measurements in a cutting-edge global change field experiment to close this knowledge gap by examining plant growth responses to elevated CO2 during repeated drought cycles.
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PhD opportunity: Unravelling the role of lags and legacies in explaining the response of grasslands to elevated CO2
This project will apply a state of the art, hierarchical Bayesian modelling framework to determine how past climatic conditions influence current responses to high CO2concentrations. The project will use data from a new, specially-designed experiment, as well as results from past Free-Air Carbon dioxide Enrichment (FACE) and Open-top chamber (OTC) experiments, to close this knowledge gap.
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UNSW14: Developing a parametric extreme weather index for agricultural crop insurance
This project will explore the potential for developing site-based and event-based extreme weather indices for parametric crop insurance using reanalyses of atmospheric climate variables.
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BoM03: The role of soil moisture drought for wheat production in Australia
The aim of this student project is to investigate the relationships between hydrological extremes (especially soil moisture drought) and wheat production in Australia. The outcome of the project may inform the development seasonal forecasts of hydrological indicators for agricultural production in Australia.
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Research brief: New global runoff estimates help define past energy and water budgets
Together with a recent paper estimating evaporation and transpiration from the land surface, this paper brings the community a step closer to observationally constrained estimates of the historical land surface energy and water budgets
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El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) risks for Western Australian graziers
Bella Blanche writes about spending time on the vast Macfarlane Station in Tambo, Queensland and introduces a methodology to assess risks posed by climate change, and the vulnerability of the native rangeland resources located west of the Great Dividing Range.
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UNSW-CAN2: Climate change and East African rainfall: combining observations from local farmers and weather stations
Climate change is affecting weather patterns in many locations. In East Africa, changing rainfall would challenge the livelihoods of farmers. However, perceptions of local farmers and data from local weather stations differ. Is rainfall changing? How can we understand these two important information sources?
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Drought RP report – August 2018
Research has now begun in earnest in the Drought Research Program with all key staff finally in place. This has proved timely. At the time of writing (August 2018) most of NSW has been drought declared and forecasters suggesting little sign of drought-breaking rains over coming months.
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Research brief: Ecohydrological equilibrium approach improves modelling of LAI
New research clearly demonstrates the potential to predict long-term LAI using simple ecohydrological theory. This approach could potentially be incorporated into existing terrestrial biosphere models and help improve predictions of LAI.
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Research brief: Droughts inconsistently represented across climate models
This study evaluated GCMs for common drought metrics during the past 55 years. It found different models can produce very different simulations of drought, depending on the type of drought and metric analysed. The study points to a need to improve GCMs for droughts to reduce uncertainties in future projections.
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