#Extreme events

Sydney and New South Wales (NSW) north coast residents continue to battle poor air quality as a result of fires burning through the state. Our bushfire expert Andrew Sullivan delves beyond the smoke haze to explain the current crisis and the tough conditions ahead.

The field of climate change event attribution research has emerged recently and can provide new insights into Australian climate extremes.

A collision of severe weather events can destroy lives and infrastructure, destabilising economies and ecosystems. In a rapidly warming world the frequency and magnitude of these compound events will only increase, according to the latest report from the IPCC.

Salamo Fulivai reads the nightly news in Tonga but when Tropical Cylcone Gita arrived it was more than a story. Fortunately, forewarned is forearmed. Just months earlier Salamo had been part of climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction training.

As work gathers pace for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s next climate predictions, scientists sense a groundswell of change to try and meet the Paris Agreement.

Out of the ashes of the Tathra bushfire, and stories of heartbreaking loss and survival, a picture is emerging of how research is helping to save properties and improve bushfire outcomes.

Australians go through more than 6,000 petajoules of energy every year to keep everything from their phones to their factories running. It’s a nice number for pub trivia, but if you’re a policy maker, researcher, or investor in our nation’s future energy demands, you’ll need something better than a back-of-the-envelope calculation. CSIRO’s Energy Use Data Model could soon come in handy.

A lot has been learned about fire behaviour from the bushfires that have lashed the Australian continent in the past. But to really refine fire behaviour knowledge, researchers need to put their hypotheses to the test through carefully orchestrated large-scale field experiments.

The science of thunderstorm asthma is relatively unknown, what is least understood is the interaction between pollen and thunderstorms.