Honours supervisors

Gab has several possible honours projects in land surface modelling and applied maths in climate research. Land surface modelling topics range from comparing ecological relationships in models and observations through to model evaluation techniques including benchmarking, model independence and uncertainty estimation.

Possible topics in applied maths include: clustering techniques, artificial neural networks, wavelets or non-linear time series analysis. Ideally students would have basic maths and computer skills, but might have a background in biology/ecology, maths, stats, computer science, engineering or chemistry.

Lisa is seeking students who are interested in understanding how extremes of climate have changed in frequency or duration in the past and how these events could change in the future. Using observations and climate models, projects will primarily focus on 1) understanding the variability and drivers of heatwaves, droughts and extreme rainfall across Australia, 2) assessing the relative contributions of changes in climate extremes to natural variations and anthropogenic forcing, and 3) determining how climate change might impact heatwaves and droughts in the future. Ideally students should have a background in maths, physics, statistics or computer science but projects might also suit students with good numerate skills from other fields such as physical geography, meteorology or engineering.

Click here for staff listing and contacts.

Matt has a number of research projects available to prospective honours students who have a strong foundation in maths and/or physics. These projects fall under the broad topic of Southern Hemisphere ocean circulation and climate dynamics.

The aim of this set of projects is to better understand regional ocean circulation and variability and its role in climate and climate change. An initial focus may be the circulation and variability in the Southern Ocean, which is a key interest of the prospective supervisor. Other areas of interest include climate modes in the tropical Indian and Pacific Oceans, and the North Atlantic overturning circulation. Projects will involve using applications of ocean and climate system models in conjunction with available observations. The studies aim to (1) quantify regional ocean circulation and variability (2) discover how this impacts on climate and weather patterns, and (3) calculate the associated predictability of any related extreme climate events.

How well do regional climate models simulate Australia's climate? Several regional climate modelling groups around the world have produced simulations of Australia's climate. This project will apply several evaluation metrics to these simulations in order to assess the relative performance of the models. It will investigate the places and the phenomena that they do and do not capture successfully. The potential also exists to look at the future climate change projections produced by both the good and the bad models in order to understand the potential future impacts on water resources, agriculture etc.

Donna is interested to find students from a wide variety of disciplines to work with on issues related to climate change impacts, human rights, legal aspects of climate change, energy policy and technology development, connecting research with social activism...Topics could include: climate change and health impacts in remote communities (comparative methodological work with Arctic communities a likely area for exploration); legal implications of climate impacts in the Torres Strait (further development of the human rights/ international legal dimension) also working within the framework established by Pacific Island nations; cultural impacts on Indigenous Australians from climate change - how does the changing environment impact cultural and social well-being? Carbon management techniques in Northern Australia - how can Indigenous Australians benefit from emission trading schemes? What are the pros and cons of these activities? And, research projects on climate justice in Australia.

Click here for staff listing and contacts.

Alex is particularly interested in the influence of ocean temperatures and large-scale climate variability on regional climate extremes. Methods include using observations & numerical experiments and oceanic changes under global warming and effects on habitats and biological dispersal, and using coupled climate model output and experiments in biophysical ocean models.

Joe has a range of honours projects available to students with a math, physics, or computing background.  The work will focus on large-scale atmospheric dynamics, researching the processes that determine the characteristics of features such as the midlatitude storm track, the tropical Hadley cell, and the stratospheric overturning circulation.  The projects involve testing and developing theories for the atmosphere using idealized general circulation models (GCMs), state of the art GCMs, and historical observations.

Click here for staff listing and contacts.

Steve is looking to supervise honours students working on a range of topics. They include: exploration of high-latitude climate feedbacks arising from atmospheric processes, based on theory and observation of changes over recent decades; exploration of why cloud feedback varies in different numerical climate models by comparing their behaviour with expectations from simple theories and calculations of radiation transport; societal and health impacts of increased humidity in warmer climates using simple mathematical models and detailed cloud simulations under various conditions to test theories of storm development.

Steve is looking for students who are interested in two research topics.  The evolution of the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool: A data-model study. The Indo-Pacific Warm Pool (IPWP) is the warmest body of open-ocean water on Earth, and influences both regional and global climate. Coral records from Indonesia and Papua New Guinea show that the extent of the IPWP has changed over the past 7,500 years, coinciding with changes in the strength of the monsoons over Asia and Australia. This project will use the coral record and climate model simulations to study the dynamics of the IPWP, with implications for understanding climate change in this critical region and beyond.

The second area is high-resolution data-model comparison of past El Niño events. El Niño is the dominant mode of internal variability within the climate system. Records of past climate from across the Pacific Basin show that there have been significant changes in both the strength and frequency of El Niño events over the past 7,500 years. Understanding these changes is critical if we are to be able to anticipate how El Niño might evolve in future. Using both high-resolution coral records from the central Pacific Ocean and climate model simulations, this project will study past changes in El Niño by reconstructing individual El Niño events.

Click here for staff listing and contacts.

I am interested in abrupt climate change events as well as thresholds and feedbacks in the climate system. I use 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.

I have several possible honours projects in mind depending on your own interest and background. All my work is based on climate simulations, you will therefore be involved in model development, simulations and analysis of results and there will be no field work component.

Possible projects span from gaining a better understanding of a given past event (e.g. extinction events, ice ages, etc.) to future climate simulations, the study of the oceanic or terrestrial carbon cycle, the physics of the climate system and the quantification of feedbacks within the climate system.

Click here for staff listing and contacts.

Erik is seeking eager students who are interested in studying the pathways of water around the global ocean. Erik's main research focus is the ocean circulation in a Lagrangian framework, using both model and observational velocity fields to compute how water parcels move through the ocean. The trajectories of these water parcels can be used to study how and on what time scale regions and basins are connected, and what that means to regional and global climate. The trajectories often provide a completely different perspective on ocean circulation, see http://www.youtube.com/user/erikvansebille for a few examples of particle experiments in ocean models. 

A number of projects are available that all study how and on what time scales water moves through the ocean. One such project is around the flow from the Pacific Ocean to the Indian Ocean on the southern side of Australia (the so-called Tasman leakage). Depending on personal interests, there are quite a few of these regional projects. 

Click here for staff listing and contacts.