New ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes

8 September 2016

The Australian Research Council has funded a new Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes. The new centre will transform the direction of Australian climate research and help us to understand and reduce the country’s vulnerability to climate extremes.
Climate extremes cost Australia up to $4 billion a year and will intensify over coming decades.
"Climate change will continue to be a global priority and an issue that affects everyone. ANU is known for producing world-leading climate research and that will now contribute to the work of the new centre," said Professor Michael Roderick, who will be one of the ANU Chief Investigators for the Centre.
Andy Hogg and Nerilie Abram from RSES are also Chief Investigators for the new Centre.
The more-than $30 million awarded to the new ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes will allow researchers to engage in blue-sky research to discover processes that explain the behaviour of present and future climate extremes. It will use its researchers, data, modelling, collaboration, graduate program and early career researcher mentoring to transform Australia’s capacity to predict climate extremes.
“This is a fantastic opportunity to drive innovation at the intersection of high performance computing, massive data, maths, physics and climate science,” said UNSW Professor Andy Pitman, who will lead the Centre. “We are committed to delivering new science that directly helps our management of climate extremes including enhancing our ability to forecast how they will change in the future.”
The Centre brings together world-leading researchers from five Australian universities and a range of national and international partners.
The universities include Australian National University, Monash University, University of Melbourne, University of New South Wales and the University of Tasmania.
Key national partners include the Bureau of Meteorology, CSIRO, National Computational Infrastructure, Risk Frontiers and the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage along with other major national and international partners.
International partners include NASA, National Centre for Atmospheric Research (US), Met Office (UK), Max Planck Institute of Meteorology (Germany), Swiss Federal Institute, University of  Arizona and the CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research).
The Centre will build on and extend some of the impressive work on climate extremes that has already been produced by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science.