CCRC Team: Academic and research staff

Steve explores the physics of the atmosphere as it relates to climate, with emphasis on theory and observations of cloud processes and their connections to the atmospheric circulation, water vapour, temperature distributions, and Earths radiation budget; ways in which these connections will control how water vapour, precipitation, and clouds behave in a changing climate.

Click here for more information and contact details for Professor Steven Sherwood.

Matthew’s main research activities reside in large-scale physical oceanography, ocean modelling, ocean-atmosphere dynamics and climate variability, with a particular focus on the Southern Hemisphere. Using ocean, atmosphere, and coupled climate models in combination with observations / theory, he studies what controls ocean currents and how these currents affect climate and climate variability on time-scales of seasons to centuries.  Particular focus areas include the circulation and variability of the Southern Ocean and its role in regional climate; global-scale water-mass formation: mechanisms, variability and stability; ENSO, the Indian Ocean Dipole and the Southern Annular Mode; and past ocean circulation states and paleoclimate modelling.

Click here for more information and contact details for Professor Matthew England.

Andy is a climate modeller with a major focus on land surface processes. Recently, he has been working on coupled carbon modules for climate models including dynamic vegetation how vegetation responds to increasing carbon dioxide and how uncertain our projections of the future might be given instability in terrestrial carbon storage. He has also explored the global and regional impacts of land cover change. He has interests in climate extremes and how these are likely to change in the future. Andy co-chairs the Project for the Intercomparison of Landsurface Parameterization Schemes, he is chair of GLASS, a lead author in the IPCC, a member of National Committee for Earth System Science, convenor of the ARC Research Network for Earth System Science and co-director of the Climate Change Research Centre at UNSW.

Click here for more information and contact details for Professor Andy Pitman.

Chris explores past climates and their relevance to future change. By developing and applying new methods to investigate natural archives across Australia and the globe as a whole, he is developing reconstructions that allow historical weather records to be extended beyond the mid-nineteenth century. Working with climate models, Chris is using these reconstructions to look into the mechanisms, timing and impact of extreme change in the past and future at regional and global scales which will ultimately enable an improved understanding of the mechanisms of both past and future abrupt climate change in Australia and globally.

Click here for more information and contact details for Professor Chris Turney.

Click here for the Palaeoclimate Consortium.

Gab is interested in theoretical problems in climate and environmental modelling. What is the relationship between model predictions and the natural system and under which conditions are model results meaningful? Specific research areas include: measures of model independence; performance and model-space metrics; identification and quantification of model bias; stochastic performance measures and likelihoods; as well as issues surrounding statistically based versus physically based modelling of climate change scenarios. His work has focussed on land surface models and he has contributed to the ACCESS land surface model, CABLE. Gab is also an adjunct research fellow at CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research.

Click here for more information and contact details for Dr Gab Abramovitz.

Changes in the frequency and/or severity of extreme climate events have the potential to have profound societal and ecological impacts. Lisa's work primarily focuses on improving our understanding of observed changes in these events using multiple research tools ranging from station observations to climate model output. Much of her work has been focussed on the creation of high quality global datasets and comparison with state of the art climate models.

Email Dr Lisa Alexander.

Jason is interested in water resource issues, particularly the impact on water resources of changes in climate and changes in land-use. He uses various tools to examine the changes including regional climate and surface hydrological models, satellite remotely sensed and in-situ data and stable isotope analysis.

Donna focuses on human-environment interactions, specifically on social and economical vulnerability, adaptation and risk. Her current research programme uses indigenous and non-indigenous knowledge to understand climate impacts on remote communities in northern Australia. Her teaching focuses on linking energy policy, climate change and environmental impacts in Australia and internationally.

Melissa’s main research focus is in the area of urban climate, in particular the impact of land-use, surface characteristics and anthropogenic activities on the climate of cities, and quantification of the magnitude of the urban heat island (UHI). Melissa is also working in the area of climate sensitivity of building energy consumption and is developing Typical Meteorological Year (TMY) data files under future climate scenarios for use in building energy modelling, thereby allowing assessment of building energy consumption under climatic conditions predicted to occur during the life of the building. Other research interests include statistical climatology and air pollution meteorology; public perception, behaviour change and health impacts of extreme weather and air quality; and climate model downscaling.

Email: melissa.hart@unsw.edu.au

Joe works on large scale atmospheric dynamics. He aims for a theoretical understanding of important problems such as:

• The cause of the poleward shift of the jet streams
• How a poleward shift of the jet streams will affect regional climate and climate variability
• The controls on the atmospheric eddy length scale
• The dynamical mechanism of the 'annular modes'
• The cause of the increase in stratospheric overturning

He uses a range of tools in this work, including observational datasets, fully coupled GCMs, and highly idealized dynamical models.

Click here for more information and contact details for Dr Joe Kidston.

Ben is currently researching:

• Global carbon cycle - C0₂ sources and sinks
• Climate change policy, Australia's role in the Kyoto protocol
• Climate change and oceanic impacts: including processes such as air-sea gas exchange, water mass ventilation, biological carbon export and coral reef calcification
• Southern Ocean carbon cycle
• Detecting and attributing climate change in the ocean.
  

Click here for more information and contact details for Dr Ben McNeil.

Email: a.maharaj@unsw.edu.au

Katrin is interested in abrupt climate change events, as well as thresholds and feedbacks in the climate system. She uses Earth System Climate Models in conjunction with paleoclimate records to improve our understanding of the basic mechanisms underlying climate variability and climate change, particularly in the context of terrestrial biogeochemical cycles and ocean circulation.

Click here for more information and contact details for Dr Katrin Meissner.

Alex is looking at a number of different aspects of the southern hemisphere climate, both its mean state and variability. Developing an offline model (based on MOM1) which includes passive, age and CFC tracers to look at ventilation pathways and timescales for deep and bottom waters. This method allows unprecedented multi-century integrations at eddy-permitting resolutions. Currently, he is extending this work to look at intermediate waters. As an offshoot of this he also developed a lagrangian model that has been used to investigate the dispersal ability of a species of jellyfish and to determine if their dispersals are mainly natural or anthropogenic. More recently he has been doing model runs and analyzing the extensive model datasets of the NCAR CCSM coupled climate model. The long datasets have allowed various statistical techniques to be applied to extra-tropical southern hemisphere variability. In particular he is looking at the Southern Annular Mode(SAM) and its effect on the ocean and ice systems. He is currently looking at possible feedbacks from the ocean and ice systems back onto the SAM.

Click here for more information and contact details for Dr Alex Sen Gupta.

Paul is currently using a suite of global climate models, ranging from coarse to ocean eddy-permitting, to investigate ocean dynamics. His research is currently focused on water mass transformation in the North Atlantic and the Southern Ocean, as well as dynamics in the equatorial Pacific.

Click here for more information and contact details for Dr Paul Spence.

Erik studies the pathways and time scales of water as it circulates around the oceans. He is particularly interested in the connection between the different ocean basins, and what determines how much water 'leaks' from one ocean basin into another. This typically occurs in regions of the ocean (south of South Africa and south of Australia) which are dominated by large amounts of variability. Particularly in these regions, but also elsewhere in the ocean, pathways of water parcels are complicated and seemingly chaotic and bear very little resemblance to the classic textbook pictures of the global ocean circulation. Erik's primary goal is to create a global picture of the ocean circulation from the trajectories and time scales of these looping, eddy-driven water parcels.

Click here for more information and contact details for Dr Erik van Sebille

Stephanie is a physical oceanographer with research interests in ocean dynamics, specifically scale interactions in the oceanic circulation and the implications of these interactions for the large-scale circulation. She likes to look at problems from both observational and theoretical perspectives, using targeted field observations, observational data analysis, idealised process modelling, analytical analysis, and laboratory studies in her work.  Her current research focuses on understanding eddy mixing mechanisms through an innovative decomposition of the eddy motion into various components, an approach she applies to theoretical models, various observations of eddy motion in the Southern Ocean, and state-of-the-art climate models.  She is also interested in understanding the effects of eddies in the ocean circulation more generally, in particular in jet systems like the Gulf Stream and Kuroshio, as well as in the role of submesoscale processes (i.e. internal waves and turbulence) in Southern Ocean dynamics.

Joe is mostly interested in how phenomena on large scale end of atmospheric dynamics - such as the MJO and the Hadley Circulation - interact with the climate. One current project is an attempt to identify and understand how the boundaries of the tropical region have moved in the recent decades and may continue to move in the near future as the climate changes.

Click here for more information and contact details for Dr Joseph Andersen.

Daniel investigates regional climate modeling and the study of climate change at regional scales. He uses regional models to generate high-resolution projections of climate change and explore its implications on precipitation and temperature, particularly in terms of extreme events. Daniel is also interested in the parameterization of sub-grid scale processes and the evaluation of models' ability to represent current climate.

Click here for more information and contact details for Dr Daniel Argüeso.

Lluís is interested in the understanding of the processes and mechanisms that driven severe atmospheric events from the regional to local scale on present climate conditions and future ones: extreme cyclogenesis, convective systems, storms, medicanes. For this purpose he uses limited area atmospheric numerical models in combination with different diagnostic and analysis tools. At the same time, he is currently using the atmospheric models to provide regional climate information for Australia. He is also involved in the development of generic frameworks that would help to use numerical models on a wide range of computer resources independently of their characteristics: local machines, local clusters and/or GRID environment.

Click here for more information and contact details for Dr Lluís Fita Borrell.

Claire’s research focuses on coupling a land surface model with a regional atmospheric circulation model to better understand actual and future Australian climate at regional scales. Previously, Claire was part of the support team for the atmospheric chemistry model, GEOS-Chem, in the Atmospheric Chemistry Modeling Group at Harvard University, US. She implemented new model developments, benchmarked new versions and kept an up-to-date documentation. Claire also did a one-year post-doctoral fellowship at the National Institute for Environmental Studies, Japan. Her research at the institute estimated CO₂ fluxes coming from and going into the atmosphere over Western Siberia using regional atmospheric CO₂ inversions. Claire achieved her PhD in 2006 at the Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environment (France). As part of her PhD she developed a method to perform regional inversions of atmospheric CO₂ concentrations and tested it over Western Europe.

Charlotte is a palaeoecologist with an interest in Late Quaternary palaeomonsoon variability in Australasia and climate-landscape-human dynamics in extreme environments. She uses multi-proxy analysis of lake sediments (e.g. pollen, organic and lithological analyses), coupled with AMS 14C radiocarbon dating of bulk and fossil pollen concentrations to reconstruct past landscape and climatic changes, with a view to developing a deeper understanding of the behaviour of monsoons over abrupt (annual to decadal) and long (centennial to millennial) timescales.

Email: charlotte.cook@unsw.edu.au

Mark's research focuses on the land surface and its interaction with the atmosphere. Specifically his interests include using land models in conjunction with in-situ and remotely sensed measurements to study the impact of land processes on weather and climate, the development of land models focusing on improving the representation of the various physical processes, and the impact on climate due to both natural and anthropogenic changes in the land surface. Currently he is identifying regions in Australia where groundwater has a significant impact on climate through the use of models and remotely sensed data.

Email: m.decker@unsw.edu.au

Markus focuses on extreme climate events, their changes under anthropogenic climate change conditions, and the uncertainties associated with observational data and climate model simulations. He is especially interested in understanding processes and changes in the climate system, and performing in-depth analyses of climate model simulations to learn about the mechanisms in the climate system and to compare the role of natural variability with anthropogenically driven changes.

Click here fore more information about Dr Markus Donat

Jeff is interested in soil carbon and nutrient processes and their parameterization in land surface models. He addresses different sources of uncertainty in order to provide estimates of soil carbon pools resiliency to climate change, i.e. will sinks become sources in a warmer world and, if so, when? This is crucial to foresee the potential of using soils as carbon sinks to compensate human emissions. With a background in hydrological sciences, Jeff remains involved in catchment scale modeling efforts, particularly in reference to water quality. Jeff is also interested in innovating optimization and multi-model methods.

Chris is a glacial geologist and palaeoclimatologist, who uses direct geochronological techniques to reconstruct the configuration of the Earths ice sheets over timescales from centuries to millennia. His research aims to improve estimates of the past contribution of ice sheets to sea level rise to enable better prediction of future sea-level rise. It also adds an important long-term perspective on recent observations of rapid ice sheet in the polar ice sheets from remote sensing and empirical observations. Ongoing research projects include understanding the response over millennia to climate forcing in locations ranging from Greenland, Svalbard, Patagonia and Antarctica. Chris is also a Honorary Fellow at The University of Exeter.

Email Dr Chris Fogwill.

Leela is interested in internal variability of the ocean - variability that is intrinsic to the ocean system rather than being externally driven. She uses a range of numerical models, from highly idealised models designed to understand the basic physical processes to coupled climate models from which we can both test the hypotheses developed from idealised models and compare the results to observations. In particular, Leela has studied Atlantic Multidecadal Variability (a long lasting pattern of sea surface temperature variations in the North Atlantic), and bimodality of the Kuroshio (decadal variations of the path of the western boundary current off the coast of Japan). 

Click here fore more information about Dr Leela Frankcombe.

James is interested in atmospheric physics--in particular, precipitation physics and how this relates to changes in climate. He uses cloud-resolving models to understand precipitation processes and extremes, with a focus on precipitation over Australia.  His background is in theoretical physics, and he employs methods from this field in his research.

Email: james.gilmore@unsw.edu.au

Daniel is currently studying the dynamics of tropical convection using cloud resolving simulations and satellite observations. His goal is to gain a better understanding of the dynamical processes involved, so as to improve current parametrizations of convection in climate models. Before coming to the Climate Change Research Centre at UNSW, he spent 4 years at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, where he obtained his Ph.D. within the International Max Planck Research School on Earth System Modelling (IMPRS-ESM). During his PhD studies he used climate models to explore the energetics response of the atmosphere to global warming. Prior to that, he completed his Physics undergraduate studies (2005) and a Master's degree in Meteorology (2007) in Bogota, at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia.

Email: d.hernandez@unsw.edu.au

Nicolas is looking at the relationship between the South Asian and Australian Monsoon. Previously, he has investigated the representation of katabatic winds in regional atmospheric simulations of the Ross Sea and Ross Ice Shelf area (Antarctica). In particular, he has quantified the role of local ocean-atmosphere feedbacks in this sea ice-covered region. Nicolas has also contributed to the understanding of the variability of the Arctic sea ice properties. The last few years he has been working on tropical cyclones and their impact on the ocean, from processes studies to climate studies.

Click here for more information and contact details for Nicolas Jourdain.

Jatin’s work focuses on improving our understanding of land-atmosphere interactions by using state-of-the-art land surface models coupled to atmospheric models. Before jointing CCRC, Jatin completed his PhD at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia, and investigated the impacts of land-cover change on meteorological phenomena in southwest Western Australia using both observational data-sets and a non-hydrostatic mesoscale regional atmospheric model. Jatin is also interested in regional climate modelling and impact assessment studies for agriculture.

Email: J.Kala@unsw.edu.au

Ruth is interested in the interactions between the earth's land surface and climate. She uses climate models and her main focus is land-climate feedbacks during extreme events. During her PhD she used regional climate models coupled to land surface models of different complexity to investigate these feedbacks in Europe. For example, she investigated the impacts from soil moisture and vegetation phenology on recent European heat waves.

Shayne uses numerical models of the atmosphere, ocean and coupled system to improve our understanding interannual to multi-decadal scale climate variability. He is particularly interested in the dynamics of the El Nino-Southern Oscillation. His current research focuses on the effect of the South Pacific Convergence Zone on the termination of El Nino events.

Click here for more information and contact details for Shayne McGregor.

Laurie studies climate carbon cycle interactions using models of intermediate complexity. She is particularly interested in the impact of abrupt changes in ocean circulation on the global carbon cycle. She also studies marine carbon cycle variations over glacial/interglacial timescales. She combines modeling experiments with existing paleoproxies to better constrain past changes in the climate and the carbon cycle.

Click here for more information and contact details for Laurie Menviel.

Sarah’s work focuses on Australian climate extremes. Her work explores observed trends in droughts and heat waves and estimating the uncertainty associated with observations. Sarah is also working on determining the natural and human components of observed regional climate change in Australia, using both observed and climate model data.  She will also investigate the combined affects of natural variability and increased greenhouse forcings on changes in climate extremes throughout the 21st Century.

Email: sarah.perkins@unsw.edu.au

Steven is a palaeoclimatologist and earth system modeller, with a particular interest in climate variability and change on millennial timescales. He is currently exploring how El Nino, the Indian Ocean Dipole and the Southern Annular Mode have evolved over the past 10,000 years, and the impacts of these changes upon the climate of the Australian region. Steven is also the developer and maintainer of the CSIRO Mk3L climate system model, a fast and portable version of CSIRO's climate model that can be used to investigate climate variability and change on millennial timescales.

Click here for more information and contact details for Dr Steven Phipps.

Agus analyses climate models and observational data to investigate modes of climate and water mass variability. Statistical data analysis techniques such as spectral, correlation analyses, empirical orthogonal functions, digital filtering, wavelets are implemented. Interests include the evolution of Southern Ocean water masses; air-sea processes in relation to the El Nino - Southern Oscillation, Indian Ocean anomalies, Antarctic Circumpolar Wave, Southern Annular Mode, and their connection to global/regional climate variability and extremes.

Click here for more information and contact details for Dr Agus Santoso.

Willem looks at numerical climate modelling, feedbacks in the global thermohaline circulation, NADW stability, Paleoclimatology. Of particular interest are the effect of the Drake Passage on past and present climate and NADW collapse.

Click here for more information and contact details for Dr Willem Sijp.

Andrea investigates the mechanisms by which the oceans can affect the climate through numerical models. She is interested in climate variability, teleconnection patterns in the Southern Hemisphere, air-sea interactions and statistical methods for data analysis.

Click here for more information and contact details for Dr Andrea Taschetto.

Dr Leanne Webb is undertaking a climate change impact study with a team at the University of New South Wales involved in exploring the impact of climate change on indigenous health. Much of her work over the last decade focused on studying observed climate and climate change as it impacts the wine industry and other agricultural sectors. Past research also includes identifying adaptation options for these important sectors.

Email: Leanne.Webb@csiro.au

Kiri is interested in climate variability and extremes in the Pacific Islands. Small island states in the Pacific Ocean are amongst the most vulnerable nations to climate variability and climate change.  Her current research focuses on enhancing tools for the analysis of historical climate extremes in 15 Pacific Island nations and understanding the drivers of climate extremes in the 20th century, using observational data and climate model outputs.

Email: k.whan@unsw.edu.au