We study the physical processes behind the weather. We use theory, observations and high-performance computing to examine key atmospheric phenomena, including clouds, fronts, thunderstorms, extreme rainfall, fire weather and turbulence.
These phenomena have important human impacts, and create risk in areas such as aviation, coastal communities, renewable energy and agriculture.
We use observations from diverse sources, including satellites, weather balloons, aircraft and LIDARS, together with millions of hours of supercomputing time each year to improve understanding of the underlying dynamics of physical atmospheric processes. This work is critical for interpreting the risk associated with local extreme weather processes in both current and future climates.
Recent research efforts in this cluster include:
- An examination of linear rain systems in Melbourne
- A study of the meteorology of the Black Saturday bushfires
- A quantification of the role of surface forcing in tropical rainfall
- An improved understanding of how tropical squall lines can interact with Indian Ocean variability.
Coordinator
Dr Claire Vincent
The above animation shows the results from high-resolution simulations of convective clouds near Darwin, Australia. The simulation is of a period during a major international field experiment: The Tropical Warm Pool International Cloud Experiment (TWP-ICE).
Simulations conducted by research staff in the School, with visualisations created as part of a collaboration with the National Computational Infrastructure supercomputing facility.
