CCRC Team: Academic and research staff
Professors
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Professor Matthew England
ARC Federation Fellow
Co-Director, Climate Change Research Centre
Matthew explores global-scale ocean circulation and the influence it has on regional climate, large-scale physical oceanography, ocean modelling, and climate processes, with a particular focus on the Southern Hemisphere. Using ocean and coupled climate models in combination with observations, he studies what controls ocean currents and how these currents affect climate and climate variability on time-scales of seasons to centuries.
Applications of this work include:
- the circulation and variability of the Southern Ocean and its role in regional climate pattern;
- global-scale water-mass formation: mechanisms, variability and stability;
- the oceans thermohaline circulation, stability, and feedback to the atmosphere;
- the Southern Annular Mode and Australian rainfall variability; and
- past ocean circulation states and paleoclimate modelling.
Click here for more information and contact details for Professor Matthew England.
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Professor Andy Pitman
Convenor, ARC Network for Earth System Sciences
Co-Director, Climate Change Research Centre
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.
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Professor Steve Sherwood
Post Graduate Coordinator
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
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Academic staff
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Dr Gab Abramowitz
Lecturer
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. |
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Dr Lisa Alexander
Senior Lecturer
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.
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Dr Jason Evans
Senior Lecturer and ARC Australian Research Fellow
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.
Click here for more information and contact details for Dr Jason Evans. |
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Dr Donna Green
Senior Lecturer
Donna focuses on human-environment interactions, specifically on social and economical vunerability, 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.
Click here for more information and contact details for Dr Donna Green. |
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Dr Ben McNeil
Senior Lecturer and ARC QEII Research Fellow
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.
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Dr Steven Phipps
Research Fellow
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.
Steven Phipp's CV
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Dr Alex Sen Gupta
Lecturer
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. |
Research staff
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Dr Laura Ciasto
Post Doctoral Research Fellow
Laura focuses on statistical analysis of observed large-scale climate variability. In particular, she is interested in extratropical ocean- atmosphere interaction, the Southern Annular Mode and the El Niño Southern Oscillation. |
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Dr Marc dOrgeville
Post Doctoral Research Fellow
Marc is interested in the large scale variability of the Climate system. His focus is on the role of the ocean indecadal and multidecadal variability and the stability of the thermohaline circulation. This involves analysis of observations and paleo-reconstruction, as well as the use of a variety of numerical models, from idealized to fully-coupled GCM. |
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Dr Agus Santoso
Post Doctoral Research Fellow
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
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Dr Willem Sijp
ARC Postdoctoral Research Fellow
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.
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Dr Paul Spence
Post Doctoral Research Fellow
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.
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Dr Andrea Taschetto
Post Doctoral Research Fellow
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. |
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Dr Caroline Ummenhofer
Post Doctoral Research Fellow
Caroline focuses on large-scale Southern Hemisphere modes of climate variability on seasonal to interannual timescales. She is particularly interested in Indian Ocean variability, the Indian Ocean dipoles (tropical and subtropical), extratropical ocean-atmosphere interactions, and the Southern Annular Mode. She also investigates Australian rainfall variability and extremes on seasonal to interannual timescales and how to apply this for improved seasonal forecasting to aid agricultural and water management decisions.
Click here for more information and contact details for Dr Caroline Ummenhofer. |
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The clean industrial revolution
So where does Australia’s economic future lie in this rapidly changing world? In this compelling book, climate scientist and economist Ben McNeil demonstrates the immense opportunities that will open up if Australia leads the new clean industrial revolution. |
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