Welcome to the website for the UNSW Climate Change Research Centre (CCRC) based in the Faculty of Science.

 

The Climate Change Research Centre at UNSW is a multi-disciplinary research group comprising one of the largest Australian University laboratories in climate science, oceanography, terrestrial processes, atmospheric sciences and meteorology.

 

CCRC houses research expertise in key areas of climate science. Our two key strengths focus on ocean processes and terrestrial processes. Linking these two themes are research strengths in climate dynamics, global climate change, and weather and climate extremes. Within the oceans program are strengths in large-scale physical oceanography, coastal ocean circulation, paleoclimate dynamics, the oceans thermohaline circulation, wave breaking and global biogeochemical cycles. On the land surface, our focus is the modeling of terrestrial processes in climate models. This includes carbon dynamics, hydrology, vegetation processes and how all these interact to affect climate.

 

The tools used by CCRC scientists include global and regional climate models, large-scale ocean circulation models, coastal domain simulations and weather prediction systems. This is augmented by data collected from both ships, eddy-flux towers and aircraft from regions as diverse as the Great Barrier Reef, the tropics, urban surfaces, the Tasman Sea and the Antarctic.

 

This web site primarily details the research and teaching activities of the UNSW Climate Change Research Centre. If you require any further information, please contact us.

 

The UNSW also has considerable climate-related expertise which is hosted in the School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences (BEES). This expertise is in the particular areas of paleo-climate reconstruction, holocene climate variation, climate-ecological-fire interactions and the impacts of climate change on water.  Further details can be found at the BEES website.

 

 

 

 

The Land & Water Australia Eureka Prize for Water Research and Innovation went to UNSWs Professor Matthew England, Dr Caroline Ummenhofer, Dr Alex Sen Gupta, Dr Agus Santoso and Dr Mike Pook, for discoveries linking ocean temperature and rainfall. The groups discovery of a predictive link between sea surface temperatures in the Indian Ocean and drought seasons over Australia, Indonesia and Africa is helping agriculture reduce costs by planning for weather extremes. The UNSW team was led by Professor England, Co-director of the Climate Change Research Centre. Dr Pook is from CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research, in Hobart.

 

 

Three new tenure track continuing academic appointments open at the CCRC: