Alumni

Former PhD Student

Field of research: Heatwaves

Contact details:
Phone: 9385 9766
Email: c.pathmeswaran@student.unsw.edu.au

Charuni completed her Bachelor's in Environmental Science at the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka and her Masters in Climate Change Science and Policy at the University of Bristol, UK. For her master's dissertation, she investigated the sub-daily variability in temperature and relative humidity and their impact on heat stress. During her PhD, she hopes to examine the drivers of heatwaves and to gain an in-depth understanding of how heatwaves are changing and accurately isolating the human influence on heatwaves.

Thesis: Dissecting heatwaves: The importance of physical mechanisms and human influence

Heatwaves have increased in frequency and intensity over the years as a result of worsening anthropogenic climate change. Therefore it is important to gain an in-depth understanding of how heatwaves are changing and accurately isolating human influence on heatwaves. I hope to achieve this through my PhD while also providing invaluable knowledge to policy-makers and stakeholders. The work done during my PhD will ensure that the Centre continues to be at the forefront of thought leadership and policy surrounding climate change and its impacts. I also believe that our research findings will enable communities to be better prepared through effective adaptation policies in the future.

Former PhD Student

Contact details:
Email: a.stellema@unsw.edu.au

Annette has a Bachelor of Science in Physics and Physical Oceanography, with honours in Climate Science at the University of New South Wales. Her honours thesis examined how and why the circulation of the Indian Ocean is projected to change in a future of increasing greenhouse gas emissions. During her PhD, she will use Lagrangian methods to examine how the movement of tracers in the ocean is projected to change in the future.

 Former Scientia PhD Student

Field of research: Ocean-Climate Dynamics

Contact details:
Phone: 9385 9766
Email: m.huguenin-virchaux@unsw.edu.au

Both my Bachelor's degree in Earth Science and my Master's degree in Atmospheric and Climate Science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ) in Switzerland provided me with a comprehensive knowledge in mathematics, physics, biology and earth sciences. To broaden my knowledge in climate research and my great interest in ocean sciences, I undertook a research practicum at UNSW to work on my Master thesis titled "Mechanisms Driving Ocean Heat Uptake over ENSO Events". In this project, I simulated my own idealised ENSO events in a global ocean model and investigated processes that lead to vertical heat exchanges during these events. After completion of my Master's degree, I led a collaborative research project between ETHZ and MeteoSwiss on changes in the atmospheric circulation over Central Europe before returning to UNSW for my PhD studies.

Role: Former Post Doctoral Research Fellow
Field of Research: Oceanography
Email: f.boeira_dias@unsw.edu.au

PhD in Quantitative Marine Science by the University of Tasmania. My main interests are on the interaction between ocean and the Antarctic ice shelves and its simulation using a circumpolar ocean-ice shelf model. My current research activities revolve around a mechanistic view of the ocean heat and salt transport in and out the ice shelf cavities and the impact of the ice melting in the ocean circulation, water masses, sea level and climate.

Role: Former Post Doctoral Research Fellow & PhD Student

Role: Former Post Doctoral Research Fellow & PhD Student
Field of research: Oceanography

I am a Research Scientist at the Climate Change Research Centre (CCRC) at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). I am a research associate for the Australian Centre for Excellence in Antarctic Science (ACEAS) and an associate investigator for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes (CLeX). 

My research involves the use of atmospheric / ocean and coupled climate models to understand the dynamics of large-scale atmospheric circulation and its influence on Southern Hemisphere climate, including Antarctic sea-ice. I also have a keen interest in tropical cyclones and how they may be impacted by climate change.

Areas that I work / interested in :

a) Tropical - extratropical teleconnections

b) Climate variability

c) Coupled extreme events

d) Climate Policy

e) Environment, Social and Governance (ESG)

Role: Former Senior Post Doctoral Research Fellow

Agus Santoso was a senior research associate at the Climate Change Research Centre.  He was awarded a PhD in 2006 by the UNSW School of Mathematics and Statistics.  His research aims to unravel the mechanisms that govern climate variability on seasonal to centennial time scales.  Research interests include tropical climate variability and global thermohaline circulation, in particular the dynamics and future projections of the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD).  Many drought and flood episodes in Australia have been attributed to ENSO and IOD.  Dr Santoso is an associate investigator at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes and is an editor for the Journal of Climate of the American Meteorological Society.  He has served in the World Climate Research Programme CLIVAR Pacific Regional Panel and was one of project leaders at the Centre for Southern Hemisphere Oceans Research (CSHOR; July 2017- June 2022).

Role: Former Post Doctoral Research Fellow

Anthropogenic (Human-Induced) Climate Change is unequivocal and we are now witnessing the severe consequences of anthropogenic climate change. The rise in global ocean warming, sea level, reduction in sea ice, increased extreme events like tropical cyclones and marine heatwaves, etc. all because of rising greenhouse gas concentration in our atmosphere.

I am a climate scientist, working as a Postdoctoral researcher at CCRC, UNSW. My research interest is Ocean Warming and circulation changes, Sea-level Variability, and Marine Heatwaves Impact. I did my B. Tech in Aerospace engineering, M.Tech, and PhD in Physical Oceanography and Climate Science. I am open to collaboration in the area of climate science.

In my PhD, we found the cause of the rapid warming of the southern hemisphere ocean as compared to the northern hemisphere. This rapid warming was attributed to an asymmetric mode of internal variability in combination with anthropogenic warming.

In the next part of my PhD, we used a novel technique of using sea surface salinity for the improvement in the prediction of Australian rainfall using machine learning. We found that sea surface salinity is the second most important precursor after ENSO for the prediction of Australian rainfall.

In my last postdoc position, I am working on Southern Ocean Carbon and Heat Impact on Climate (SO-CHIC). We are investigating the Antarctic Bottom Water ventilation time scales and pathways using NEMO 1-deg Global Ocean Model.

I my current postdoc I am working to understand the sea level change and variability and how well we can constrain the future sea level projections using CMIP model output and observations.

Role: Former Postdoctoral Research Fellow

I research how different aspects of global change are affecting the vegetation of terrestrial ecosystems. I mostly focus on how meteorological extremes affect the woody ecosystems of Australia and the tropics. I am particularly interested in the usage of Earth Observation technologies to examine processes in ecophysiology and ecosystem ecology. 

My research tends to utilize: 

• Earth observation and remote sensing
• climate data
• statistical modeling
• machine learning

Role: Former Post Doctoral Research Fellow & PhD student

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Manon-Sabot

Former Centre Manager

Former masters student

Former PhD Student

Former Honours Student

Former Lecturer

Role: Former PhD student
Field of Research: Oceanography
Email: esteban.abellan@unsw.edu.au

Dr Esteban Abellán completed his PhD in June 2017 under the supervision of Dr Shayne McGregor and Prof Matthew H. England. His PhD research focused on the role of meridional movement of Pacific winds in El Niño-Southern Oscillation event onset and termination. In particular, he analysed the southward shift of the zonal wind during El Niño events as the main mechanism in making the events peaking near the end of the calendar year, and he also investigated how the 2015-16 El Niño became an extreme event. He used simplified coupled models, reanalysis products and data from the state-of-the-art CMIP5 climate models. Esteban’s thesis was titled ‘Meridional movement of Pacific winds and their role in ENSO event onset and termination”. 

Dr Abellán joined the Climate Change Research Centre (The University of New South Wales) - ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science in August, 2013. He is currently working with Katestone as a meteorologist on supporting the operation of their weather forecasting products and contributing to the development and testing of new weather products.

Click here for more information and contact details for Esteban.

Role: Former Scientia PhD Student
Field of research: Oceanography
Phone: 9385 9766
Email: z5180050@student.unsw.edu.au

Alfonso received his BSc in Computer Science from the Pontifical University of Salamanca in 2000 and his MSc in Computer Science from the University of Valladolid in 2002. After working in the private and public IT sector for eight years in Europe and Asia, he joined the United Nations in 2011. From 2013 through 2017, he worked coordinating humanitarian assistance delivery in Iraq before taking a leave to earn his MSc in Marine Science from UNSW in 2019. Subsequently, Alfonso obtained a Scientia scholarship to undertake a PhD in Climate Science at UNSW.

Thesis title: Interplay between the Antarctic ice-sheet, the oceanic circulation and climate

Role: Former PhD Student
Field of research: Climate extremes
Email: oliver.angelil@unsw.edu.au

Oliver started his PhD in March 2015 at the Climate Change Research Centre at the UNSW. His research investigates how human activity (through our greenhouse-gas emissions) has contributed to the frequency and nature of weather extremes. Answers to these questions can be reached by analysing output from climate models run under a range of climate scenarios forced with specific concentrations of greenhouse gases — some representative of a theoretical world supposing humans had never interfered with the climate system. Solving the problem relies on credible climate model simulations in periods where we have poor observations (e.g. 150 years ago when the climate was "natural"). However, since climate models are imperfect, he uses statistical methods to select subsets of models or weight models differently, such that they collectively compare well to training observations in-sample. If results are satisfactory after cross-validation (in sample) or model-as-truth experiments (out-of-sample), he then applies the trained statistical models out-of-sample into unknown territory! These machine learning techniques can improve hindcast/prediction skill of past/future climate.

Oliver is from Cape Town, South Africa, but completed his Master's degree in Zurich, Switzerland. Oliver's PhD title is "Uncertainty Around Probabilistic Event Attribution Statements for Extreme Weather Events".

Role: Former Post Doctoral Research Fellow
Field of Research: Regional Climate
Email: d.argueso@unsw.edu.au

Daniel investigates how climate change will manifest at regional scales. He uses regional models to generate high-resolution projections and study how local variables will respond to changes of large-scale climate patterns. He is particularly interested in cloud-permitting simulations with focus on urban climate and precipitation extremes. Daniel is also interested in exploring how large scale drivers are connected with variability of heat waves, river flows and extremes.

For more information, see Daniel's website.

Role: Former PhD student
Field of Research: The impacts of land-use induced land cover change on climate extremes

Dr Francia Avila completed her PhD in December 2012 under the supervision of Prof. Andy Pitman and Dr Gab Abramowitz. Her PhD research focused on the impacts of land use-induced land cover change on climate extremes.  She also worked with Dr Lisa Alexander and Dr Markus Donat on the gridding-related scaling effects on the annual statistics of climate extremes.

Dr Avila joined the Environmental Science Department of the Ateneo de Davao University, Davao City, Philippines, in June 2015.  She is currently working with Fr Daniel McNamara, SJ on downscaling climate projections for Mindanao; with Dr John Burtkenley Ong on rainfall-induced debris flow; and with Dr Doris Montecastro on ocean biogeochemistry and air quality modelling.  She also teaches Earth and Atmospheric Science, and Computer Simulation and Modeling to undergraduate students.

Dr Avila previously worked as a Research Assistant at the Manila Observatory, Quezon City, Philippines, where her work ranged from network administration and web site development to research on emissions inventory, tropical cyclone forecasting and regional climate modeling.  Her outreach activites involved communicating the science of climate change and assisting in enabling activities designed to build disaster resilient communities.

Role: Former Phd Student

Field of research: Climatology, hydrology and hydro-meteorology

Hooman graduated with a degree in Civil Engineering from University of Guilan (Iran) and then continued his engineering education (Water Engineering) at the K. N. Toosi University of Technology (Iran). Hooman's fields of interest are climatology, hydrology and hydro-meteorology and using remotely sensed data, especially ground-based radar and satellite data, to forecast meteorological phenomena. His PhD thesis focussed on studying climate extremes using radar and satellite data.

Role: Former PhD student
Field of Research: Oceanography

In 2016, Witek Bagniewski submitted his PhD thesis titled "Oxygen isotopic response to changes in meridional overturning circulation during the last glacial period and deglaciation”.

Under the supervision of A/Prof. Katrin Meissner and Dr Laurie Menviel, Witek's PhD research focused on the oceans and ice sheets of the last glacial period, using the UVic Earth System Climate Model to simulate a large meltwater event. By investigating the signals of abrupt climate change in the Ocean he aimed to improve the understanding of marine paleoproxy records.

Role: Former PhD Student
Field of research: Extreme precipitation
Email: jiawei.bao@student.unsw.edu.au

Jiawei started his PhD in September 2015. His research focuses on the extreme precipitation change with temperature in Australia, with a particular focus on identifying the reasons which lead to the different scaling rates among different regions in Australia by applying statistical methods in observational data and doing some simulations with regional climate models.

Jiawei graduated from Beijing Normal University with a master of science degree in 2015. During his masters, Jiawei did some work on model evaluations and simulating the precipitation change in China with WRF.

Role: Former Research Associate
Field of Research: Statistics
Phone: 9385 9766
Email: adrian.barker@unsw.edu.au

Adrian completed undergraduate degrees in science and electrical engineering at the University of Sydney before commencing work at the State Rail Authority. Subsequently, Adrian worked for various organisations as a software developer and consultant and completed a PhD in statistics at Macquarie University part-time on stable distribution time series. Adrian joined the Climate Change Research Centre (CCRC) at UNSW in June 2016 as a research associate and has been developing stochastic weather generators which are used to generate probablistic water consumption forecasts for Sydney Water.

Role: Former PhD student
Field of Research: Oceanography
Email: a.barthel@student.unsw.edu.au

Alice started her PhD at UNSW in 2013. Her research focuses on eddy mixing processes in the Southern Ocean. In particular, her project investigates how jet-topography interactions affect eddy mixing‬ through the combined use of observations and idealised models. She is working with Stephanie Waterman (UBC), Andy Hogg (ANU) and Matthew England (UNSW).
Before joining UNSW, Alice completed a MSc Oceanography in Southampton (UK) where she studied the Agulhas Undercurrent from NEMO outputs. She also did short-term research work in Grenoble (France) looking at intrinsic variability of the ocean at interannual timescales, with focus on the Gulf Stream region.‬‬

Role: Former Honours Student
Field of Research: Oceanography

Role: Former PhD student
Field of Research: A dynamic, embedded Lagrangian model for ocean climate models

Dr Michael Bates completed his PhD in 2011 under the supervision of Prof. Matthew England and Prof. Stephen Griffies. His PhD research focused on the dynamics of the ocean and the representation of these dynamics in coarse resolution global scale ocean models, particularly in the subgrid scale representation of open ocean convection and downslope flows. Michael’s PhD thesis involved the development of a novel subgridscale parameterisation for dense overflows and open ocean convection in ocean climate models.

After completing his PhD, Dr Bates took up a postdoctoral position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he developed and implemented (into the MITgcm) a potential vorticity closure and variable diffusivity closure method for mesoscale eddies in coarse resolution ocean models.

Dr Bates joined Griffith University as a Research scientist in the School of Environment in January 2014. His current work at Griffith, in conjunction with the Australian Antarctic Division, involves the development of Antarctic ecosystem and pollutant models to examine the partitioning of persistent organic pollutants in high latitude near shore environments. As well as helping to inform the sampling and monitoring efforts of programs like the Southern Ocean Persistent Organic Pollutant Program, this work will help us understand how these toxic pollutants accumulate in Antarctic food webs.

Role: Former PhD Student

Shannon completed his PhD with the Climate Change Research Centre, UNSW. His research aimed to investigate new tools for the evaluation of abrupt climate change events predicted by existing models. With a background in chemical and environmental engineering, he has worked in the water treatment industry in both an engineering and research capacity. He has also had experience in the pharmaceutical industry. ​ Shannon is working to incorporate his technical skills from this background into his new role in climate research.

THESIS: Evaluating isotope-enabled models — method investigation and application

Shannon's project aimed to develop new tools in the evaluation of abrupt climate change events in pre-existing isotope-enabled models. By doing this, an enhanced understanding of these events will be obtained, providing insights in Australia's climate in a way that has not been previously possible.

Role: Former PhD student
Field of Research: Snowpack characteristics and modelling in the marginal snowfields of southeast Australia

Dr Kat Bormann completed her PhD in April 2014 under the supervision of A/Prof. Jason Evans and A/Prof. Matthew McCabe. Her PhD project entitled 'Snowpack characteristics and modelling in the marginal snowfields of southeast Australia' focused on the potential impacts of climate change on water resources in the snow-affected catchments of the Murray Darling Basin.

Dr Bormann joined NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at the California Institute of Technology in October 2013, working with the Airborne Snow Observatory. Her research interests include snow hydrology, remote sensing of seasonal snow cover, snow cover variability, spatial and temporal heterogeneity of snow properties and the representation of snow in regional climate and land surface models.

Role: Former Post Doctoral Research Fellow
Field of Research: Oceanography

Julien is interested in the tropical climate variability over various time scales ranging from seasons to centuries. His research mostly focuses on the dynamics of El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and how it is affected by the on-going increase of greenhouse gases. He uses a variety of climate models outputs (from intermediate complexity to fully coupled state-of-the-art general circulation models) to assess the relevant physical processes involved in ENSO dynamics, particularly in the Eastern Tropical Pacific basin. His current research resides on the relationships between ENSO phase and the Tropical Cyclones activity over this key region. Other interests include regional modeling of the Humboldt upwelling system (Peru-Chile), statistical and mathematical tools for climate data analysis and nonlinear dynamics.

Role: Former PhD student
Field of Research: Oceanography

Christopher Bull completed his PhD in August 2017 under the supervision of Andrew Kiss, Erik van Sebille and Matthew England. His PhD research focused on improving our understanding of the circulation, variability and dynamics of the Leeuwin Current and East Autralian Current by characterising the importance of bathymetry and non-linear processes in terms of the role of eddy fluxes and forcing variability. Christopher’s PhD thesis was titled “Circulation, dynamics and variability in Australia's boundary currents”.

For more information, see Chris' personal website

Role: Former PhD Student
Field of research: Land surface remote sensing

Arden started his PhD in February 2015, supervised by Jason Evans and Yi Liu. His research focuses on the use of remote sensing to understand how vegetation responds to variations in climate. In particular, he is interested in separating the impacts of land use practices in dryland ecosystems from those caused by climate variability.  

Role: Former Honours Student
Field of Research: Oceanography

Role: Former PhD student
Field of Research: Climate

Mr Wasin Chaivaranont completed his PhD with the Climate Change Research Centre in August 2017 under the supervision of A/Prof Jason Evans, Dr Yi Liu, and A/Prof Jason Sharples. Wasin’s PhD research focused on using recently developed satellite data to estimate grasslands fuel and how grassland fuel affected the rate of fire spread using model simulations. His thesis was titled 'How does remotely sensed degree of curing and fuel load vary in grasslands and effect modelled fire spread.

Role: Former PhD student
Field of research: Hydrological remote sensing

Xi started his PhD in March 2015 at the Climate Change Research Center at the UNSW. During his PhD career, he will be comparing and combining the satellite-based new microwave with traditional optical observations to see if it could help us better understand the dynamics of the vegetation. In order to answer this question, bushfires in Australia, croplands in China and deforestation activities in tropical areas will be investigated, which are in different land cover types and with different economic and ecological impacts.

Xi is from Nanjing, China, and finished his Masters degree there.

Role: Former postdoctoral research associate 

Dipayan's research focused on understanding how changes orbital variations and greenhouse gases drive the Earth's glacial cycles, and what they can tell us about changes in the future.

Role: Former Post-Doctoral Research Fellow
Field of Research: Oceanography

Role: Former PhD student
Field of Research: Climate

Dr Hamish Clarke completed his PhD in May 2015 at the Climate Change Research Centre, under the supervision of Prof. Andy Pitman and Assoc. Prof Jason Evans. His PhD thesis was titled 'The impact of climate change on bushfire weather conditions and fuel load".

Since completing his PhD, Dr Clarke has joined the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment as a Research Fellow in March 2016, in a joint position with the University of Wollongong. He is currently working with Dr Matthias Boer (HIE) and Prof. Ross Bradstock (University of Wollongong) on a BNHCRC funded project that examines the effectiveness of prescribed burning in reducing a range of risks across southern Australia.

Dr Clarke previously worked as Senior Climate and Atmospheric Scientist at the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage. His research focused on understanding the regional impacts of climate change, particularly on bushfire risk.

Role: Former PhD Student
Field of research: Atmosphere and convection

Thesis title: Convective memory, and the role of cold pools.

Supervisors: Steven Sherwood, Sandrine Bony, Jason Evans

• I did a Bachelor in Physics at Ecole Normale Superieure d'Ulm (ENS Ulm), Paris, France, and University of Paris Diderot (Paris 7), Paris, France.
• Then I did a Masters in Ocean, Atmosphere and Climate Sciences at Ecole Normale Superieure d'Ulm (ENS Ulm), Paris, France, and University Pierre and Marie Curie (UPMC, Paris 6), Paris, France.
• During my Masters studies, I have worked on two research projects.
• For the first one, I conducted Lagrangian trajectory analysis in convective clouds so as to investigate composition and modifications of cloudy air by entrainment, detrainment, and dilution.
• As for the second one, I carried out a study of radiative heating rates and cloud radiative forcing at the tropical tropopause layer, using reanalyses data.
• I started my PhD at UNSW in 2014. It is about tropical deep convection in the atmosphere and convective clouds. Using numerical simulations by cloud-resolving models, this PhD project aims at investigating and testing new key parameters that may help parameterisations of deep convection take into account memory/organisation effects during the growth of tropical cumulus clouds, tackling some of the biggest issues of parameterised convection in climate models.
• To make it simple, I want to assess how important MEMORY is during cloud growth. And if memory is as important as we think, what the best parameter is to capture all these effects in a simple way!
• What's our atmosphere's memory? Why does it keep its organisation?

Role: Former PhD Student
Field of research: Climate extremes
Email: s.contractor@unsw.edu.au

Steefan started his PhD in January 2015. His research focuses on the development of high spatial and temporal resolution precipitation datasets. To do this, he analyses the efficacy of various mathematical methods to grid in situ rainfall totals and aims to develop a new method capable of, among other aspects, preserving the extremes of precipitation. He is working with A/Prof. Lisa Alexander, Dr Markus Donat, and Dr Nicholas Herold, all based at UNSW.

Previously, Steefan has completed a degree in Physics with honours at the Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology (UNSW) and worked as a research assistant at the School of Physics, University of Sydney and as a data scientist at a property analytics firm in Sydney.

Role: Former PhD Student
Email: d.costa@student.unsw.edu.au

Duarte started his PhD in February 2018 at the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales. In the past seven years, Duarte has collaborated in a variety of projects and institutions in the UK and Brazil, from research to climate consultancy, about climate change in Brazil. He is particularly interested in climate extreme events and effective solutions to mitigate and/or adapt to the new risks these pose in a changing anthropogenic environment. His PhD will focus on changes in heat exchange between land-surface and the atmosphere, namely between vegetation and extreme temperatures. This research aims particularly to test the contribution from reforestation of South American native forest biomes (such as Amazonia) as a positive anthropogenic mechanism to mitigate heat extremes. Through a combination of land-surface and high resolution climate modelling tools, this PhD aims to not only further the understanding of land-atmosphere heat exchange during extreme events but also in testing the potential to positively use such strong coupling as a climate engineering tool to mitigate heat extremes under a globally warming climate.

THESIS: The role of anthropogenic reforestation in mitigating heat extremes within a globally warming environment

This PhD research aims to transform our understanding of past and present climate extremes and revolutionise our capability to predict them into the future to transform our understanding of past and present climate. The research generate new scientific advancements on the understanding of the relationship between biosphere and atmosphere, particularly for extreme heat events from land surface perturbations (like deforestation). Both CLEX and CCRC have world renowned expertise in heatwaves and land-surface modelling. This PhD aims to 'revolutionise' opportunities to use land-use management as a tool to respond to future global climate change. The expected outcomes from this research will complement our understanding of past and present land-atmosphere coupling in heat extremes and enable concrete steps forward in improving our capabilities to cope with and adapt to climate extremes in the future.

Role: Former PhD student
Field of Research: Characterization of the physiological feedbacks to increase in leaf-level atmospheric carbon dioxide from global to regional scales

Dr Faye Cruz completed her PhD in August 2010 under the supervision of Prof. Andy Pitman. Her PhD research examined the climate impacts of the vegetation response to increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Dr Cruz also worked with Prof. Pitman in the Land Use and Climate: Identification of robust impacts (LUCID) project.  

Dr Cruz joined the Manila Observatory in Quezon City, Philippines in November 2009, where she is actively involved in research concerning regional climate and climate change, extreme weather events and interactions between land surface and climate. As a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) International Research Fellow at the Meteorological Research Institute in Japan, Dr Cruz' research aims to produce high-resolution climate change information for the Philippines and Southeast Asia. Dr Cruz is also involved in the Southeast Asia Regional Climate Downscaling (SEACLID) / Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX)-Southeast Asia project under the CORDEX project of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP).

Role: Adjunct Associate Professor
Field of Research: Vegetation-atmosphere interactions
Contact details:
Phone: 9385 8957
Email: m.dekauwe@unsw.edu.au

Martin's research is about understanding how plants respond to increasing CO2, temperature and changing water availability. He is also interested in how this response of the vegetation to global change, affects the rate of climate change. He is particularly interested in ways to utilise experimental and satellite data to develop evidence-based models with a predictive capacity.

Martin is a member of the management committee for the Community Atmosphere Biosphere Land Exchange (CABLE) model, Australia's community land surface model.

Further information on Martin can be found here.

Contact details:
Email: shreya.dhame@student.unsw.edu.au

With an academic background in Earth and Environmental Sciences, and experience in the reinsurance sector, Shreya currently uses climate model experiments and data analysis techniques to understand tropical climate variability. In particular, she studies the role of the Indian Ocean sea surface temperature anomalies in modulating inter-ocean air-sea interactions via atmospheric pathways.

Thesis: Global climate response to changes in the Indian Ocean temperatures

While the present-day dynamics of the El Niño - Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon are broadly understood, climate scientists still struggle to predict major ENSO events with more than about nine months lead time. Decades of research have shown that accounting for modes of variability in the other tropical ocean basins, such as the Indian and Atlantic oceans, may add skill to ENSO predictions. Since the mid-twentieth century, the tropical Indian Ocean has warmed by 1 degree. This warming is likely to continue as the atmospheric carbon dioxide levels keep rising. The aim of this project is to understand the physical processes that influence the relationship between long-term Indian Ocean warming and tropical/extratropical climate variability, and assess how the warming affects global climate, particularly temperature and rainfall patterns.

Role: Former ARC DECRA Fellow
Field of Research: Regional Climate
Email: a.diluca@unsw.edu.au

Alejandro has now moved into a research and teaching position at the Université du Québec å Montréal in Montreal, Canada.

During Alejandro's time at CCRC, he worked to quantify likely future changes in the frequency and intensity of low pressure systems that develop or evolve over the Tasman Sea adjacent to the Australian coast (denoted as East Coast Lows; ECLs). In his analysis, Alejandro used a variety of datasets such as reanalysis products and GCM simulations although it mostly concentrates in RCM simulations performed in the context of the NARCliM project. His goal was to understand the role played by various physical mechanisms in producing changes in ECLs and to determine to what extent these changes can be better capture by the use of high-resolution climate models. Alejandro was also interested in more general issues related to regional climate modelling such as their evaluation and the determination of the added value.

Role: Former Post-doctoral Research Fellow
Field of research: Atmospheric sciences
Email: vishal.vijaydixit@unsw.edu.au

I am interested in tropical climate dynamics. Especially, I have explored the dynamics of the tropical rain-bands, i.e. the ITCZ and monsoons, in different climates. During my PhD, I investigated the role of various thermodynamic and dynamic processes in deciding the mean location, the vertical structure and the energy exports associated with the Inter-tropical convergence zone (ITCZ) using an idealized modelling hierarchy.

Now, as a postdoc, I'm exploring the role of convection-clouds-circulation coupling in the simulation of climate enigmas, such as mid-Holocene greening of the Sahara desert, the changes in the width of the ITCZ, mysterious mid-level clouds over Sahara desert and Anomalous hydrological changes. These research interests are closely aligned with the WCRP's grand challenge on Clouds, Circulation and Climate Sensitivity. 

I am also interested in developing simple models and new modelling hierarchies to understand the processes that conspire to for the Earth's past and present climate.

Click here for further information on Dr Vishal Dixit.

Role: Former ARC DECRA fellow
Field of Research: Climate Extremes
Email: m.donat@unsw.edu.au

Markus investigates extreme climate events and their changes on inter-annual to centennial time scales. His work has a focus on developing high-quality observational datasets of climate extremes, and exploring the uncertainties associated with these datasets. Using observational data and climate model simulations, Markus also works on understanding mechanisms that drive specific extreme events.

Role: Former Post-Doctoral Research Fellow
Field of Research: Paleaoclimatology

Role: Former PhD student
Field of research: Oceanography
Email: e.duran@unsw.edu.au

Earl is a graduate marine scientist who specialised in coastal physical science and completed his Honours in physical oceanography with Dr Helen Phillips and Prof. Nathan Bindoff at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (UTAS). He's currently a PhD candidate at the Climate Change Research Centre (UNSW) and is working on a project in ocean modelling / physical oceanography.

Role: Former Honours Student
Field of research: Mixed ENSO Teleconnections
Phone: 9385 9766
Email: m.eabry@student.unsw.edu.au

Michael received a BA in Philosophy and Mathematics in 1986 and a BSc (Hons.) in Applied Mathematics in 1988, both from Monash University, 2013. He subsequently qualified as a Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries of Australia and worked as an actuary in various general insurance companies and consultancies for around 30 years. In 2018, Michael successfully applied for a CLEX Summer Research Scholarship and began a MPhil in 2019 researching mixed ENSO teleconnections. Research Topic: Mixed ENSO Teleconnections The aim of this research project is to investigate mechanisms of mixed teleconnections in the southern Indian Ocean due to ENSO in order to improve the understanding of how information generated by climate phenomena in one part of the world is transmitted to other parts of the world (and thereby to improve predictability of climate signals globally). The research analyses GCGM output to understand the propagation mechanisms of Indian Ocean Rossby waves triggered by ENSO events and to quantify the relative contributions from both atmospheric and oceanographic means in their transmission.

Role: Former Research Assistant - Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes

Contact details:

Email: d.eisenberg@unsw.edu.au

Danny is a software developer who has been working on the PALS system at the Climate Change Research Centre since the beginning of 2016. Danny completed his BSc (Computer Science) in 1996. He has also worked for many years as a rabbi, specialising in adult Jewish education.

Role: Former Post Doctoral Research Fellow

  Role: Former Scientia Professor

Role: Former Post-Doctoral Research Fellow
Field of Research: Land Surface Processes

Role: Former Post-Doctoral Research Fellow
Field of Research: Regional Climate Modelling

Role: Former Senior Lecturer
Field of Research: Paleaoclimatology
Email: c.fogwill@unsw.edu.au

Chris is a glacial geologist and palaeoclimatologist, who uses direct geochronological techniques to reconstruct the configuration of the Earths ice sheets over timescales from centuries to millennia. His research aims to improve estimates of the past contribution of ice sheets to sea level rise to enable better prediction of future sea-level rise. It also adds an important long-term perspective on recent observations of rapid ice sheet in the polar ice sheets from remote sensing and empirical observations. Ongoing research projects include understanding the response over millennia to climate forcing in locations ranging from Greenland, Svalbard, Patagonia and Antarctica. Chris is also a Honorary Fellow at The University of Exeter.

Role: Former Honours StudentField of Research: El Niño southern oscillation temperature and precipitation teleconnections with a hierarchy of observationally constrained datasets

Laurence is evaluating the ability of different climate models ability to simulate temperature and precipitation extremes associated with El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO). The thesis will focus on comparing anomalies of ENSO extremes within a hierarchy of datasets with different levels of observational constraints.

I completed my undergraduate degree in Environmental Science and Management at The University of Newcastle before transferring into UNSW for Honours at the CCRC.

Role: Former PhD student
Field of Research: Climate Extremes
Email: peter.gibson@student.unsw.edu.au

Dr Peter Gibson completed his PhD at the Climate Change Research Centre in September 2017 under the supervision of Dr Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick and Prof Andrew Pitman. Peter's thesis was titled 'Heatwaves in Australia: model evaluation, drivers and future projections'. This research focused on better understanding the drivers of heatwaves in different regions of Australia in terms of atmospheric circulation and land surface conditions. Climate model data was also analyzed in terms of how well models represent the relevant drivers and how these drivers are projected to change across the 21st century.

As of November 2017, Dr Gibson is working as a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at NASA/Caltech Jet Propulsion Lab in the California, USA. 

Role: Former Post-Doctoral Research Fellow
Field of Research: Precipitation

Role: Former PhD student
Field of Research: Climate and health
Email: j.goldie@unsw.edu.au

James is a climate researcher and data scientist with a focus on visualising climate change.

As a researcher, James's expertise is in the health impacts of climate change: he completed a PhD with the Climate Change Research Centre in 2019 on heat stress in Australian cities. His research asks questions about the ways we identify dangerously hot days and how the risks of heat stress will change in the future.

James now works as a Knowledge Broker for the Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub and the ARC Centre of Excellence in Climate Extremes, where he helps climate researchers make their work more available and useful to everyone. Bringing a broad and unusual mix of research, communication and data skills to his role, James has a particular passion for data visualisation and loves finding novel way to show changes in the Earth system. Some of his recent projects include Is it Hot Right Now?, Explore Climdex and the collateral package for R. He's also a regular at hackathons and other data science events.

James also holds a Master of Business (Science & Technology) and has some experience as a freelance animator. For more information on his work, see James's website.

Associate Professor Donna Green was a founding member of the Climate Change Research Centre, UNSW. She is an Associate Investigator of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes; and the NHMRC Centre for energy, air pollution and health Research, UNSW.

Role: Former Post-Doctoral Research Fellow
Field of Research: Regional Climate Modelling

Role: Former Honours Student
Field of Research: Oceanography
Email: n.grosfeld@student.unsw.edu.au

Role: Former PhD student
Field of Research: Climate Extremes
Email: mia.gross89@gmail.com

Mia began her PhD in August 2015, supervised by Lisa Alexander, Markus Donat and Steven Sherwood. Her PhD followed on from her honours year at the CCRC, with her research on investigating changes in daily temperature extremes in the past and future for the globe. She is especially interested in the impacts from climate extremes, particularly those related to human health and heat. She's also interested in understanding the sensitivities related to the analysis of climate extremes, such as differences in methodologies and datasets used for analysis. 

Mia previously completed a Bachelor of Science at Macquarie University, where she majored in Climate Science after transferring from a Bachelor of Psychology and Health.

Thesis: The disproportionate rates of change between extreme and mean temperatures over land

Role: Former PhD student
Field of research: Land surface processes
Email: n.haughton@unsw.edu.au

Ned's research investigates the behaviour and representation of land surface processes in models.
The project involves analysis of code and simulations from a number of popular land surface models.
The aim is track down causes of patterns of weak performance and, if possible, to provide solutions to those problems.

Role: Former Post Doctoral Research Fellow
Field of Research: Climate Extremes
Email: nicholas.herold@unsw.edu.au

Nicholas is interested in both climate extremes and the climate of Earth's past. He joined the Climate Extremes research group in 2015 and is currently helping further develop software for the calculation of climate extreme indices (the ClimPACT software). His work involves interacting with communities around the globe to help utilise their meteorological data to understand trends in extremes in their region. He is also heavily involved in quantifying the uncertainty in observed precipitation extremes between various precipitation products as well as exploring feedbacks and mechanisms related to extremes.

Nicholas is furthermore interested in testing the skill of current generation climate models in simulating the significantly warmer-than-present climates of the past 65 million years. This period (known as the Cenozoic era) is a good test bed for determining whether climate models used to simulate the projected warm climates of the future are able to capture known significant climate changes in the past.

Role: Former PhD student
Field of Research: Modulation of Southern Hemisphere Climate via Large-Scale Modes and their Teleconnections

Dr Khalia Hill completed her PhD with the Climate Change Research Centre in 2010 under the supervision of Prof Matthew England. Khalia’s thesis was titled ‘Modulation of Southern Hemisphere Climate via Large-Scale Modes and their Teleconnections’ and her research focused on Southern Hemisphere rainfall variability linked to large-scale climate modes. Particularly on shifting rainfall patterns over eastern Australia and an emphasis on extreme climate conditions linked to multi-decadal variability and/or climate change.

Dr Hill is currently working as a Senior Atmospheric and Climate Scientist at New South Wales Office of Environment and Heritage. Prior to this Dr Hill held positions as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Woollongong, and a Senior Air Quality Consultant with Pacific Environment Limited.

Role: Former PhD student
Field of Research: Land Surface Processes
Email: a.hirsch@unsw.edu.au

Former Post Doctoral Research Fellow - Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes

Annette started her PhD in 2012 working with Prof Andy Pitman in the subject of land-atmosphere interactions. Using the WRF-LIS-CABLE model she runs idealised model experiments to understand the role of land surface variability on local climate. The main aim of her PhD is to understand the supply vs. demand driven controls on land-atmosphere interactions by looking at moisture transport from the land to the atmosphere.

Check out Annette's personal webpage: www.annettehirsch.com

*Update. Annette received her PhD at the University of New South Wales in 2015, where she explored quantifying the sensitivity of land-atmosphere coupling over Australia. She then worked at the Land-Climate Dynamics group at ETH Zurich, Switzerland before returning to Australia. At the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes, Annette aims to determine how we can build resilience to extreme events in our cities by exploiting our existing knowledge of land-atmosphere interactions through conventional and emerging mitigation strategies such as green roofs and cool roofs. She intends to explore this using a high resolution regional climate model that includes urban processes. Annette would also like to investigate whether we can optimise city expansion for mitigating the impacts of heatwaves without compromising societal needs.

Role: Former PhD student - Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes
Field of Research: Land Surface Processes
Email: s.hobeichi@unsw.edu.au

Sanaa started her PhD in August 2015 at the Climate Change Research Centre at UNSW, working with Dr. Gab Abramowitz and Dr. Jason Evans. During her PhD, she will assess the uncertainty of a range of observation datasets, Land surface model outputs and reanalysis products and investigate what is meaningful in each of these products for making inferences about a natural system. She will combine the strengths of these evaluation products to setup a constraint environment that evaluates Land Surface Models at a grid scale.

Sanaa has completed a Bachelor degree in Math and Computer Science at the Lebanese University and a Masters degree in Environmental Sciences at Qatar University. She conducted her Master’s thesis at ExxonMobil Research Qatar. Sanaa Worked as a Remote Sensing specialist at ExxonMobil Research Qatar.

Role: Former PhD student
Field of Research: Land surface processes
Email: Chiara.holgate@anu.edu.au

After completing a Bachelor of Engineering at UNSW in 2007, Chiara worked as a Hydrologist in Sydney for six years before travelling to Amsterdam to complete a Master of Hydrology in 2013. Her thesis is titled: 'Comparison of remotely sensed and modelled soil moisture data sets across Australia'. Currently, Chiara is undertaking a PhD at the Australian National University.

Role: Former Post-doctoral Research Fellow - Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes
Field of Research: Oceanography
Phone: 9385 9766
Email: ryan.holmes@unsw.edu.au

Ryan is a Research Associate at the Climate Change Research Centre, UNSW, Australia. Ryan received a Bachelor of Philosophy in Physics from the Australian National University in 2010 and a PhD in Physical Oceanography from Stanford University, California, U.S.A in 2016.

Ryan is interested in the physical circulation of the equatorial oceans and how processes on relatively short timescales (months to seconds), such as mesoscale and submesoscale eddies, internal gravity waves and small-scale turbulence, can influence the seasonal, inter-annual and decadal variability of the tropics. Small-scale vertical and lateral mixing are important factors in the temperature and kinetic energy budgets of the equatorial circulation and influence how heat and other tracers are transferred through the surface ocean and stored in the deep ocean. Small-scale processes in the equatorial oceans also influence phenomena such as equatorial Kelvin waves and coupled modes of variability such as the El Niño - Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Ryan uses a range of idealised and realistic ocean models combined with analysis of satellite and in-situ oceanographic data to better understand how these multi-scale processes interact.

See Ryan's personal website with research interests, CV and publications here

Role: Former PhD student
Field of Research: Paleoclimatology
Email: w.huiskamp@unsw.edu.au

Dr Willem Huiskamp completed his PhD in March of 2016 under the supervision of A. Prof Katrin Meissner and Prof. Chris Turney. His thesis was titled "Reconstructing the Southern Hemisphere Westerlies and their role in changing atmospheric CO2" and focused on the reconstruction of the westerly winds in the Southern Hemisphere and their impact on ocean circulation and the carbon cycle over millennial time scales. Dr Huiskamp will commence a postdoctoral fellowship at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in January 2018. He will be working with Prof. Stefan Rahmstorf as part of the PALMOD project.

For more information, see Willem's website.

Role: Former PhD Student
Field of research: Oceanography
Phone: 9385 9766
Email: david.hutchinson@unsw.edu.au

Thesis title: Interhemispheric Asymmetry in Global Warming: The Role of Ocean Heat Transport

Supervisors: Matthew England, Andy Hogg

Profile: David is interested in the ocean's influence on the interhemispheric asymmetry of global warming. He has tested the impact of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current on the asymmetry through ocean gateway experiments and is currently studying the role of eddy dynamics through a high resolution coupled ocean model. He is also interested in the impact of shifting the southern hemisphere westerly winds and the role of sea ice melt in setting the asymmetry.

Website: http://dkhutchinson.wordpress.com/

Role: Former Post Doctoral Research Fellow
Field of Research: 
Climate Change Processes
Phone: 9385 9766
Email: damien.irving@unsw.edu.au

After completing a Bachelor of Science at the University of Melbourne in 2009, Damien worked at CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research in Aspendale for a few years developing regional climate projections for Australia and various Pacific island nations. He then completed a PhD at the University of Melbourne looking at tropospheric planetary waves, before taking up his current position working on detection and attribution of ocean temperature and salinity change. Damien has a strong interest in scientific computing and open science; during his spare time he is an instructor with Software Carpentry and is the author of a blog about research best practice in the weather, climate and ocean sciences. Damien is currently undertaking postdoctoral research with Prof John Church.

Role: Former Post Doctoral Research Fellow
Field of research: Oceanography
Email: n.jourdain@unsw.edu.au

Nicolas is analysing the climate model biases over the region of the Maritime Continent. He is developing high-resolution models to understand the role of fine-scale topography and air-sea interactions in that region. Nicolas is now also looking at ocean and atmosphere interfaces with the Antarctic ice sheet, with a particular focus on the last decades/near future variations.
Previously, he has investigated the Australian/Asian monsoon and IOD-ENSO interactions in the CMIP5 models (CCRC, Australia), the interannual variability of tropical cyclogenesis (IRD, New Caledonia), the air-sea interactions under tropical cyclones (LEGI, France), and the interaction between katabatic winds and sea ice in Antarctic polynyas (LGGE, France).  

Role: Former Research Associate
Field of Research: Oceanography
Email: j.kajtar@unsw.edu.au

Jules is a research associate at the Climate Change Research Centre, UNSW. He analyses climate models and observational data to investigate modes of climate variability.

Jules has a diverse research background, but with particular expertise in numerical mathematics. Before commencing at the CCRC in October 2012, he completed his PhD on numerical relativity and fluid dynamics (Monash University, 2010). He then undertook a postdoctoral fellowship, during which he built and analysed numerical models of swimming fish (Monash University, 2010-12).

Role: Former Post Doctoral Research Fellow
Field of Research: Land Surface Processes
Email: j.kala@unsw.edu.au

Jatin’s work focuses on improving our understanding of land-atmosphere interactions by using state-of-the-art land surface models coupled to atmospheric models. He is also interested in model development and improving parameterisation schemes to better represent land surface processes within models. He is particularly interested in the representation of vegetation within coupled  climate models, and how this influences land-atmosphere feedbacks. Prior to joining the CCRC, Jatin completed his PhD at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia, and investigated the impacts of land-cover change on meteorological phenomena in southwest Western Australia using both observational data-sets and a non-hydrostatic mesoscale regional atmospheric model. Jatin is also interested in regional climate modelling and impact assessment studies for agriculture and forestry.

Role: Former PhD student
Field of Research: An investigation into extreme rainfall variability in Australia

Role: Former Visiting student

Field of Research: Land Surface Processes

Marco is a visiting student from university of Hamburg, Germany

His project is: Quantifying the role of land-atmosphere feedbacks on climate by using the Community Atmosphere Biosphere Land Exchange (CABLE) model

Role: Former PhD Student
Field of Research: Biogeochemical Modelling

Thesis title: Representations of biological calcification in two climate models

Supervisors: Katrin Meissner (primary) and Matthew England (secondary) (UNSW), Andreas Schmittner (Oregon State University)

Karin completed a PhD in 2014. Her research interests include representations of biogeochemistry in earth system models and internally-driven climate feedbacks.

Role: Former Post Doctoral Research Fellow
Field of research: Oceanography
Phone: 9385 9766
Email: v.lago@unsw.edu.au

Véronique Lago completed her B.Sc. in Physics at the Université de Sherbrooke (Canada) in 2007. She then worked as a research assistant between 2007 and 2008 in physical oceanography at the Institut National de Recherche Scientifique in Québec City (Canada) on observational physical data in the Canadian Arctic. In 2011, she completed her M.Sc. in physical oceanography at the University of Alberta (Canada), analysing the role of ocean model resolution on the freshwater input from Greenland’s ice sheet to the Labrador Sea and its impact on the subpolar North Atlantic circulation. In 2016, Véronique completed her PhD in physical oceanography at University of Tasmania and CSIRO, studying the effect of decomposed long-term changes at the ocean surface onto the changes in ocean properties in the ocean interior.
 
Véronique’s interests are in understanding the links and feedbacks between climate change signals as forcing at the surface of the ocean and changes in the ocean interior. In particular, using long-term projected estimates of the meltwater input from Antarctica from melting icebergs and basal runoff to evaluate the multi-decadal impact on ocean circulation.

Field of research: Climate system science

Contact details:
Phone: 9385 9766
Email: seenyeeleanne.lee@student.unsw.edu.au

Leanne is an honours student at UNSW. She is majoring in Climate System Science and Physical Geography in her undergraduate studies. She has always been interested in meteorology and climate sciences and aspired to help the science community investigate the details of different meteorological events and phenomena. With great concerns regarding global warming, she believes it is important to understand the science behind it and realise how large the impacts of anthropogenic activities are on the environment.

Contact details:
Phone: 93859766
Email: josh.li@student.unsw.edu.au

Josh is an undergraduate Mathematics student at UNSW due to graduate in May 2021. Currently, he's working on his honours project on analysing climate models at the Climate Change Research Centre with Professor Steve Sherwood. Previously he has exchanged at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he worked on a research project on a partial differential equation fitting algorithm with Professor Sung Ha Kang and a data mining project at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Josh's research interests include climate modelling, climate change, and machine learning.

Role: Former Post Doctoral Research Fellow - Centre of Excellence for Climate Systems Science
Field of Research: Oceanography
Phone: 02 9385 9766
Email: qian.li5@unsw.edu.au

Qian received her PhD at the Pennsylvania State University in 2018, studying the jet-scale overturning circulations in the Southern Ocean. Qian’s research interests include the ocean mesoscale eddy-mean flow interaction, Antarctic Circumpolar Current dynamics, mixed layer dynamics, tracer transport, and modes of atmospheric variability over the Southern Ocean.

For more information, see her website: https://qianlievelyn.com/

Role: Former PhD student
Field of research: Climate science
Email: yue.li@unsw.edu.au

Yue began her PhD in August 2013, with supervisors Dr Alex Sen Gupta, Dr Andréa Taschetto, Dr Nicolas C. Jourdain (Institut des Géosciences de l'Environnement, France) and Dr Wenju Cai (CSIRO, Aspendale). Her research focuses on modelling climate variability over the Maritime Continent at a range of time scales spanning diurnal cycle, seasonal climatology and annual cycle. She was particularly interested in the impacts of variation of air-sea interaction on climate over this region. To achieve this goal, she employed an ocean-atmosphere coupled regional model, that is, NEMO-OASIS-WRF (‘NOW’), to investigate the roles of temporal and spatial variability of sea surface temperature in influencing the mean-state and variability of rainfall over the Maritime Continent.

Yue has gained a master’s degree in climate science in June 2013. Her master’s project was to evaluate the Indian-Australian monsoon seasonality and tropospheric biennial oscillation transitions associated with monsoon in observations and CMIP models.

Field of research: Oceanography

Zhi started his PhD in August 2018. His research focus is on the formation, variability and mechanisms controlling Subantarctic Mode Water in the Southern Ocean. Particularly the interannual variation of the annual subduction rate in the Southern Ocean by using a gridded Argo product.

Zhi graduated from Ocean University of China with a Masters degree of science in 2018. During his Masters, Zhi worked on the response of the tropical Indian Ocean to GHGs and aerosols. Zhi's master thesis focussed on the subduction of the SAMW and AAIW in the Southern Ocean.

Field of research: Climate extremes

Email:yiling.liu@student.unsw.edu.au

Yiling Liu is a PhD student at the Climate Change Research Centre, UNSW working with Dr Markus Donat, A/Prof. Lisa Alexander and Prof. Matthew England. Her research focuses on climate extremes. In particular, her project will investigate variability and predictability of temperature and precipitation extremes on seasonal to decadal timescales. Before joining UNSW, Yiling worked at China Meteorological Administration. 

Role: Former Post Doctoral Research Fellow
Field of Research: Land Surface Processes
Email: r.lorenz@unsw.edu.au

Ruth is interested in the interactions between the Earth's land surface and climate. She uses climate models and her main focus are land-atmosphere feedbacks during extreme events. She investigates effects from soil moisture variability, land use change or vegetation phenology. In addition, she looks at how well extreme events, such as heat wave, droughts or heavy precipitation events, are represented in the global climate model ACCESS. An important aim is to find out more about the link between land surface anomalies and extremes and how the description of land surface processes in the models affects the simulated extreme events.

Contact details:
Phone: 9385 9766
Email: j.lorenzatto@student.unsw.edu.au

Jordan is an undergraduate student of Applied Mathematics at UNSW who is due to graduate at the end of 2021. He's currently working on his honours thesis, which aims to better understand the role of stratosphere-troposphere coupling in influencing periods of extreme Australian weather, under the supervision of Dr Martin Jucker at the Climate Change Research Centre.

Role: Former PhD student
Field of research: Climate extremes
Email: t.loughran@student.unsw.edu.au

Tammas is interested in how modes of climate variability and local processes drive aspects of heatwaves in Australia. He's using principle component analysis and air parcel back-trajectories to investigate how teleconnections and local processes interact to produce heat waves in both models and observations.

Role: Postdoctoral ResearcherField of Research: Land Surface Processes
Email: shaoxiu.ma@unsw.edu.au

Shaoxiu’s main focuses are the carbon, nitrogen and water cycle of the land ecosystems and it’s interaction with atmosphere. Specifically, he is investigating the impacts of the growing season change of plants on the atmosphere on global scale by using ACCESS (UM+CABLE). He was used to work with land surface models such as BIOME-BGC, PaSim and had experience in analyzing the uncertainty and sensitivity of the land surface models and in identifying the spatially generalized ecophysiological parameters for the land surface models by using eddy flux measurements and remote sensing products.

Role: Former PhD student
Field of Research: Oceanography
Email: n.maher@student.unsw.edu.au

Dr Nicola Maher completed her PhD in April 2016 under the supervision of Prof. Matt England and Dr. Alex Sen Gupta. Her PhD research focussed on the role of natural drivers in controlling interdecadal to decadal variations in surface climate. Specifically, she focussed on the role of the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation in driving hiatus periods and upper ocean heat content changes during the recent hiatus. She also investigated the role of volcanic eruptions in reducing surface temperature and whether they could drive a El Niño–Southern Oscillation response.

Nicola previously completed her honours in the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at the Australian National University under the supervision of Assoc. Prof. Andy Hogg and Prof. Ross Griffiths. Here, she investigated the effects of changes in westerly wind stress and buoyancy forcing on the Antarctic Circumpolar Current using a rotating tank experiment.

Nicola has now been awarded a Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellowship and will begin work with Jochem Marotzke at the Max-Planck-Institut für Meteorologie in Hamburg in November 2016. Here she will investigate the role of external forcing such as volcanoes and anthropogenic greenhouse gas and aerosol emissions in changing the characteristics of internal modes of variability.

Role: Former PhD student
Field of Research: An investigation into the interaction between large-scale variability and precipitation

www.penelopemaher.com/contact.html

Role: Former Post Doctoral Research Fellow
Field of Research: Atmospheric Sciences
Email: d.mantsis@unsw.edu.au

I am a scientist with a passion for the Earth's climate system. Before coming to Australia I was living in the US for eight years, where I did my PhD with Dr Amy clement at the University of Miami, and I also worked as a post-doc with Dr Ben Lintner at Rutgers University. My research focuses on the atmospheric, oceanic and land components of the climate system, and I have a particular interest for the past climate. Other topics that I am interested in are seasonal forecasting and the Mediterranean climate.

For further information, please see my CV.

For rececent publications, please see here

Jenni worked in education for a decade and she has translated her concern with outcomes for the vulnerable to applied research. She published work on the association between educational outcomes and environmental exposure to lead. Jenni is now keen to extend her work on disadvantage to investigate health risks of heatwaves and related adaptations and interventions.

Thesis: Climate and health

Jennifer started her PhD in June 2018. She is developing her research questions for her thesis. Her areas of interest are public health risks of climate change and related adaptations and interventions. Her research will explore these topics in Sydney, Australia.

Role: Former ARC DECRA Fellow
Field of Research: Climate Dynamics

I use instrumental and paleo-proxy observations along with numerical models of the atmosphere, ocean and the coupled system to improve our understanding of interannual to multi-decadal scale climate and sea-level variability. I am particularly interested in the dynamics of the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and my current research focuses on the termination of these events and their warm (El Nino) and cold (La Nina) phase asymmetries.

Role: Former Honours Student
Field of research: Oceanography
Phone: 9385 9766
Email: s.mckenna@student.unsw.edu.au

I began my honours project in 2019 at the CCRC at UNSW, after completing my undergraduate at UNSW (Climate System science major). I'm researching Indian ocean variability in climate models, looking into the ENSO-IOD relationship.

Role: Former Post-Doctoral Research Fellow
Field of Research: 

Land Surface Processes

Contact details:
Phone: 9385 9766
Email: z5160369@ad.unsw.edu.au

Anthea has just completed her bachelor of economics and advanced mathematics, majoring in econometrics and advanced statistics. Throughout 2021 for her statistics honours, Anthea will be researching the return periods on severe bushfires within Australia by analysing compound events.

Role: Former PhD Student
Field of research: Glaciology and palaeoclimate
Email: h.millman@student.unsw.edu.au

Helen started her PhD at UNSW in February 2015, arriving from the UK via Antarctica. Her research focuses on Antarctica’s contribution to sea-level rise during the Last Interglacial (~135-116 ka) using data from ice cores, as well as modelled outputs from the Potsdam Parallel Ice Sheet Model (PISM-PIK) and the CSIRO Mk3L GCM.

Helen has a BSc in Geography from Swansea University and an MSc in Glaciology from Aberystwyth University. Her previous research includes basal sediment transport in polythermal glaciers in Svalbard and land system models of Icelandic valley glaciers. Before joining UNSW, she worked as an Earth Observation scientist in her home county of Devon.

Role: Former Honours Student
Field of research: Marine heatwaves
Phone: 9385 9766
Email: r.misra@student.unsw.edu.au

Ritwik is completing an Honours year with Climate Change Research Centre at UNSW. He is currently investigating Marine Heatwaves.

Role: Former Post Doctoral Researcher
Field of Research: Oceanography
Phone: 9385 9766
Email: l.missiaen@unsw.edu.au

Lise is an early career scientist interested in the role of the oceans in climate transitions, in particular across abrupt climate change. She is using a variety of tracers from paleoclimate records in conjunction with Earth System Climate Models to reconstruct past ocean circulation changes and assess the impact of ocean circulation changes on the climate. Her work aims as well at identifying the thresholds and feedbacks between the ocean, the carbon cycle and the climate system. Lise's research is also about improving our understanding of the mechanisms, strengths and limitations of the paleo-proxies.

Role: Former PhD student
Field of research: Oceanography
Email: k.naughten@unsw.edu.au

Kaitlin began her PhD in August 2014, with supervisors Katrin Meissner, Matthew England and Ben Galton-Fenzi (ACE CRC, Hobart). Her research focuses on modelling sub-ice shelf circulation in the Southern Ocean and how it may respond to climate change. She is particularly interested in warm offshore Circumpolar Deep Water and how it is transported onto the Antarctic continental shelf. To investigate these processes, she is using two ocean/sea-ice/ice-shelf models: ROMS (Regional Ocean Modelling System) and FESOM (Finite Element Sea-ice Ocean Model).

Kaitlin has previously studied the software architecture of climate models (with Steve Easterbrook at the University of Toronto), projections of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation in a warming world (Andrew Weaver, University of Victoria), and the role of Atlantic circulation changes in the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (Katrin Meissner, UNSW). She graduated from the University of Manitoba in 2014 with a B.Sc. Honours in Mathematics; for her honours thesis, she derived a simplified model of ocean circulation.

For more information, see Kaitlin's website

I am a climate scientist who completed my PhD in December 2018 under the supervision of Professor Steve Sherwood. Immediately following my PhD, I worked with the New South Wales Department of Planning for 3.5 years. My expertise lies in machine learning, regional climate modelling, atmospheric convection, climate extremes, and climate strategy. In my new role as Manager of Climate Strategy at Transport for New South Wales, I am leading a team of scientists and project officers to make the transport sector more resilient to climate change.

I am passionate about climate and believe it is of utmost importance that we take action now to protect our planet for future generations. Climate change is a real issue that is already having a devastating impact on our environment, wildlife, and communities around the world. I believe that we can take steps to reduce our carbon emissions, invest in renewable energy, and create a more sustainable future for all. We are the stewards of our planet and I am determined to do my part to help create a better future.

Contact details:
Email: l.orihuelapinto@student.unsw.edu.au

BSc and Engineer degrees in Meteorology at La Molina National Agrarian University (Peru). MSc degree in Atmosphere Ocean & Climate at the University of Reading (England).

Bryam is a Peruvian meteorologist who started his PhD in the Climate Change Research Centre (CCRC) in July 2018. With a background primarily in atmospheric science, he has worked in different topics including research in tropical dynamics, seasonal forecasts and urban meteorology.

Role: Former PhD student
Field of research: Climate and health
Email: marissa.parry@student.unsw.edu.au

Marissa's PhD examines the effect of temperature extremes and air pollution on human health in the greater Sydney region. Her primary research interests include the effects of temperature and air pollution on human health, climate change and human health, environmental and climate justice, and climate change law and policy, particularly, climate change and health policy.

Role: Former masters student

Preethi received her Bachelors in Physics from Kerala University, India and Masters in Meteorology from CUSAT, India. She worked on Indian Summer Monsoon Teleconnections to El-Nino Southern Oscillation and Indian Ocean Dipole at IITM, Pune, India, while pursuing her Masters. Preethi was a research student at National Centre for Polar and Ocean Sciences (NCPOR), Goa, for one year, working on the Arctic cloud changes and associated warm events. Preethi is now working on the role of tropical clouds in the large scale circulations and how clouds changes as the climate warms.

Thesis: Role of tropical clouds in the large scale circulations

The role of clouds in controlling the energy budget of the earth's atmosphere is of more practical value than the warming caused by the doubling of CO2. Slight changes in the cloud cover can have drastic effects on the net radiation. The changes in the clouds and convection patterns with the warming climate is of more importance since it can have huge and immediate effects on the climate leading to further warming or cooling of the atmosphere. Hence understanding how the clouds respond to a warming climate, and its role in the large scale circulation patterns is of considerable importance. Also, the changes in the circulation patterns affect the cloud formation as well. This understanding will help us to figure out how the clouds will respond in future, in a warming scenario.

Field of research: Role of tropical clouds in the large scale circulations

Role: Former PhD student
Field of research: Climate science
Email: s.perry@student.unsw.edu.au

Sarah started her PhD in 2015, supervised by Shayne McGregor (Monash University), Alex Sen Gupta and Matthew England. Her research focuses on understanding the projected changes to the climate impacts of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) due to climate change. She is particularly interested in the projected changes to temperature and precipitation impacts over global land areas, including regional scale changes, and has investigated these changes using coupled climate models, a large ensemble, and atmosphere-only simulations.

Previously, Sarah completed Honours in Environmental Science at the University of Wollongong, graduating in 2014. Her Honours thesis investigated the influence of ENSO events on the entrance regime of coastal lakes and lagoons (ICOLLs).   

Role: Former Research Fellow
Field of Research: Paleoclimatology
Phone: +61 2 9385 8957
Email: s.phipps@unsw.edu.au

Steven's research aims to understand the drivers of past climate variability and change, particularly over the last 2,000 years. To approach this problem, he uses a combination of climate system models and natural archives, such as corals, tree rings and ice cores. His core research interests are past climate variability and change in the Southern Hemisphere, the influence of the sun and volcanoes on the Earth's climate, and techniques for integrating climate system models with data from natural archives.

For more information, see Steven's webpage

Role: Former Honours Student
Email: z5017349@ad.unsw.edu.au

Joel started his University career in 2013 studying Advanced Science and Economics at UNSW. After completing the undergraduate part of his degree majoring in Climate Dynamics, he is continuing his climate career doing an honours project at UNSW in 2018.

THESIS: How well can we simulate monster East Coast Lows (ECLs) such as the June 2016 ECL?

ECLs are rapidly developing, intense low pressure systems that bring flooding rain, damaging winds and damaging surf to the East Coast of Australia. At the moment, these systems are hard to accurately predict with global or regional forecasting models as models need to be high resolution to simulate the effects. The project is to simulate the June 2016 ECL that affected the entire NSW coastline using a high resolution regional model. Using an array of different parameters, an ensemble will be produced and then compared to observations for this system. Such a model could prove very useful in predicting the development of future ECLs and provide businesses and the public the means to better prepared for the impacts.

Role: Former Post Doctoral Research Fellow
Field of Research: Clouds and Climate
Email: abhnil.prasad@unsw.edu.au

Abhnil is interested in solving the cloud-climate problem that deals with couplings that occur through the relationships of the vertical distribution of clouds and their impact on atmospheric circulation, and the effects of clouds on heating and moistening of the atmosphere, and heating of the surface. These processes are studied using models along with satellite remotely sensed and in-situ data. 

Matt is in his honours year of an Advanced Science degree at UNSW, majoring in applied mathematics, with a background in maths and physics. In his honours thesis, Matt is investigating long term asymmetries in the way the ocean responds to interannual warming and cooling, and how this might be used to improve projections from climate models. Matt hopes to continue his studies in the climate sciences in a PhD following his honours year.

Thesis: Investigating asymmetries in the response of long term ocean heat uptake to interannual variability in climate models.

Matt's proposed topic seeks to understand asymmetries in the effect of interannual and interdecadal variability of surface warming and cooling on long term trends in ocean heat uptake. Experiments have been performed with interannual, oscillatory warming and cooling perturbations at the ocean surface, and the ocean has shown a net cooling as a result. The principal mechanisms as to why this occurs are still uncertain, and clarifying them is key to our understanding of how variability will affect the future state of the ocean, as well as to improving climate predictions. More, as the magnitude of future climate extremes is intimately linked to the sensitivity of the climate today, a better understanding of the mechanisms at play in the climate system is critical to improving projections of how extreme events are likely to occur in the future. Matt also hopes to relate the asymmetries in ocean heat uptake to the effect of volcanic forcing in climate models, to better improve projections of future climate made from these models.

Field of research: Oceanography

Role: Former PhD student
Field of Research: Climate
Email: ariaan.purich@csiro.au

Ariaan started her PhD at CSIRO/UNSW in 2014. She is looking into the observed relationships between large-scale climate features and trends across the Southern Ocean and Antarctica, and determining whether such relationships also exist in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 (CMIP5) models.

Ariaan completed her MSc in atmospheric and oceanic sciences at McGill University (Canada) in 2011, where her research focussed on dynamically-induced precipitation changes associated with Antarctic ozone hole depletion. From 2012-2014, Ariaan worked at CSIRO, looking into the relationship between large scale climate drivers (El Niño Southern Oscillation, the Indian Ocean Dipole, and the Southern Annular Mode) and Australian rainfall, as well as heat wave metrics and synoptic conditions across Australia.

Role: Former PhD student
Field of Research: Oceanography
Email: xuerong.qin@unsw.edu.au

Shirley is interested in modeling biophysical interactions in the oceans. Her PhD focuses on understanding circulation and nutrient variability in the tropical Pacific using Lagrangian techniques.

Click here for personal web page.

Role: Former PhD student
Field of Research: Sensitivity of ocean circulation and marine biogeochemical processes to variations in surface wind stress and diapycnal mixing in the surface ocean

Dr Sami Rifai started his postdoctoral research position at the ARC Centre for Climate Extremes in 2020. He researches how Australian and tropical forest ecosystems are affected by aspects of global change (climate, CO2, disturbance). His recent work uses spatiotemporal statistical modeling of remote sensing data to examine ecosystem processes.

Field of research: Oceanography

Contact details:
Phone: 9385 9766
Email: himadri.saini@student.unsw.edu.au

I received a Bachelor's degree in Physics honors in 2015, during which I also did a two-month internship on Vertical structures of atmosphere at Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore. After that, I further went to study Masters in Atmospheric Science from Savitribai Phule Pune University (SPPU). Under this program, I did my one year dissertation at Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune. Later after finishing my Master's in 2017, I worked at IITM as a Project Assistant for almost a year (September 2017 to July 2018). I started my PhD with CLEX at CCRC (UNSW) in August 2018.

Thesis: The Southern Ocean's response to abrupt Climate Change

The ocean plays a critical role in Carbon Cycle feedback. Recent studies suggest that in the long term, physical, chemical, and biological processes in the ocean will play a larger role than the land in climate-carbon coupling. The nature and strength of carbon cycle feedbacks are poorly understood and only crudely represented in climate models. This project leverages evidence from abrupt climate change events that occurred during the last ice age to improve predictions of the earth system response to human cause climate change. The Southern Ocean (SO) is a key region for natural air sea CO2 exchange and consequently a driver of the atmospheric CO2 levels both in modern times and in recent geological past. A little is known about how the SO responded to abrupt climate change events of the past. Work to reconstruct SO's CO2 exchange response to climate change is urgently needed to improve climate cycle feedback in climate models and to anticipate future impacts on global climate, biological productivity, and fisheries.

Role: Former Post Doctoral Research Fellow
Field of Research: Oceanography
Email: t.sasse@unsw.edu.au

Tristan’s research is aimed at understanding the oceans role in the global carbon cycle. This includes analysing ocean measurements to understand the mechanisms driving ocean carbon variability, and how they will respond to Earths future climate and atmospheric CO2 concentration. Two of his main goals include diagnosing patterns of air-sea CO2 exchange and ocean acidification.

Role: Former Post Doctoral Research Fellow
Field of Research: Oceanography
Email: j.scuttphillips@unsw.edu.au

I am a Post Doctoral Research Fellow at the Climate Change Research Centre, UNSW. I completed my PhD (2015) in Marine Ecology at the Institute of Complex Systems Simulation at the University of Southampton, United Kingdom, in collaboration with the Secretariat of the Pacific Community in Nouméa, New Caledonia.

My research interests center on trying to understand and predict the behaviour of marine ecosystems, in which fishing pressure, changing climate and loss of biodiversity are of immediate concern in many parts of the world. In particular, my principal work focuses on examining the way in which small-scale animal behavioural data can inform or be incorporated into larger scale management of marine ecosystems. I employ empirical analysis of tagging and catch data alongside simulation experiments to explore the mechanisms that are responsible for the often complex patterns we observe in the real world. I have provided management and policy advice in this regard to commissions and governments in both Europe and the Pacific region. Having worked with a wide variety of scientists and stakeholders in the tuna industry, I have extensive in situ experience to be both passionate about, and considerate of, the factors that are important in tuna fisheries, from how data is collected through to the consequences of the science for artisanal and commercial stakeholders.

Twitter: twitter.com/jscuttphillips

ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Joe_Scutt_Phillips

Role: Former Post Doctoral Research Fellow
Field of Research: Oceanography
Phone: 9385 9766
Email: g.serazin@unsw.edu.au

Guillaume is a Research Associate at the Climate Change Research Centre, UNSW, Australia. I received a Master of Science from Claude Bernard University, Lyon (France) and a Master of Engineering from École Centrale Lyon, Écully (France) in 2011. In 2012, he had a short work experience in the aeronautic industry before switching to research in geophysics. In early 2016, he completed a PhD in Physical Oceanography from Paul Sabatier University, Toulouse, while being based most of the time at the Laboratory of Glaciology and Geophysics of the Environment, Grenoble. From 2016 to 2018, he worked as a Post-doctoral Research Associate at the Laboratory of Studies in Geophysics and Spatial Oceanography.

Guillaume studies oceanic turbulent flows with the support of high-resolution ocean models and observations. He mostly focuses on the impact of mesoscale oceanic eddies (O 100 km) on the climate system through their feedback with the atmosphere and their capacity to generate long-term fluctuation, sometimes called eddy-driven variability or intrinsic variability. Oceanic eddies may hamper the detection and the attribution of long-term changes in some regions of the ocean, while also affecting the atmospheric dynamics and weather patterns at midlatitudes. At even smaller scales (O 1-10 km), he also studies submesoscale motions, characterised by fronts and filaments, and propagating internal waves, generated by the interaction of the barotropic tides with steep topographic features. To do so, he uses existing observations from in situ shipboard measurements of velocities, temperature and salinity, as well as from autonomous gliders and satellite altimeters. He eventually contributes to develop several numerical tools in Python for signal processing and analysing large geophysical datasets, within the community effort Pangeo.

Role: Former PhD student
Field of Research: Variability of carbonate chemistry in the southern Great Barrier Reef: implications for future ocean acidification

Role: Former Senior Lecturer | ARC Research Fellow (ARF)
Field of Research: Paleoclimatology
Email: w.sijp@unsw.edu.au

Willem looks at climate modelling, the global ocean circulation and its stability and Paleoclimatology (climates of the past). His work is at the interface of geology, climate science and applied mathematics, with several main broad research interests:

• The conundrum of pervading global warmth up to the late Eocene (33 million years ago), and the subsequent global cooling trend culminating in the ice ages.
• The role of abrupt responses in the Earth system to ice sheet evolution during glacial cycles.
• A mathematical description of the stability of ocean circulation

Role: Former PhD student
Field of Research: El Niño and El Niño Modoki impacts on South American rainfall

Role: Former PhD student
Field of Research: High-latitude Southern Hemisphere climate variability, trends, and tropical forcing

Role: Former Post Doctoral Research Fellow
Field of Research: Meteorology & Physical Oceanography
Phone: 02 9385 9766
Email: siwon.song@unsw.edu.au

Siwon completed Ph.D. in Meteorology and physical Oceanography at University of Miami and started working with Dr. Steven Sherwood at CCRC, UNSW in 2018.
 
Siwon is interested in convection-environment interaction in the large-scale framework, especially the process of organizing clouds to form mesoscale convective systems (MCSs). Because of complex feedback between convection and large-scale dynamics, she approaches it with linearity. Based on the concept of linear response function by Kuang (2010) and comparison with convective scheme in a single column model, she plans to examine causality between convective tendencies and interesting environmental conditions, i.e., density current, microstate memories, etc. She is also interested in analyzing high-resolution global data to examine the realistic relationship between convective tendencies and the large-scale variables.

Role: Former Senior Lecturer | DECRA
Field of Research: Oceanography
Email: paul.spence@unsw.edu.au

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.

Role: Former Post Doctoral Research Fellow

Field of Research: Oceanography

Contact details:

Email: kial.stewart@unsw.edu.au

Kial is an oceanographer investigating eddies in global ocean models and datasets. He employs a framework for characterizing the geometry of ocean variability to further our understanding of eddy-mean flow interactions.

https://sites.google.com/site/kialstewart/

Role: Former Post Doctoral Research Fellow

Field of Research: Physical Oceanography, Climate Change Processes

Contact details:

Phone: 9385 9766

Email: v.tamsitt@unsw.edu.au

I am a UNSW postdoctoral fellow and visiting scientist at CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere based in Hobart, Tasmania. I am a member of the Center for Southern Hemisphere Research (CSHOR) working on the Southern Ocean dynamics, circulation and water mass formation project team.

My research combines ocean observations and models to better understand the three-dimensional structure of the Southern Ocean overturning circulation and its role in climate.

Role: Former Post Doctoral Research Fellow

Field of Research: Climate and Health

Contact details:

Email: engjoo.tan@unsw.edu.au

Eng Joo is interested in the impacts of climate change, specifically on human health and productivity. His current research focuses on the usage of microsimulation models to forecast the potential health and economic burden of climate-related diseases caused by future climate change. Previously, Eng Joo was involved in the research of extreme heat at workplaces and how it affects the health and performance of Australian workers.

Lina has a background in Meteorology. In her Master's thesis, she compared simulated burned area of global dynamic vegetation models and subsequently worked as a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg. During her PhD, she focusses on different sources of uncertainty in carbon cycle projections, including the impact of climate variability, uncertainty in global climate model projections, and uncertainties in the parametrisations of dynamic global vegetation models when applied to regional scales.

Field of research: Uncertainty in climate and regional carbon cycle projections

Role: Former Research Associate

Field of Research: Paleaoclimatology

Contact details:

Email: z.thomas@unsw.edu.au

RESEARCH INTERESTS

I currently work as a postdoctoral researcher in the palaeoclimate group at the University of New South Wales. My research involves finding abrupt changes or 'tipping points' in the Earth's climate by looking for generic indicators that can precede tipping points. The ability to detect these indicators has clear implications for the interpretation of palaeoenvironmental datasets, as well as future projections of climate.

IN THE MEDIA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVC-Kvok1JI&t=371s

TEACHING

GEOS3761 Environmental Change (Lecturer)
CLIM3001 Climate Systems Science (Guest Lecturer)

PUBLICATIONS

Turney CS M;Fogwill CJ;Palmer JG;Van Sebille E;Thomas Z;McGlone M;Richardson S;Wilmshurst JM;Fenwick P;Zunz V;Goosse H;Wilson KJ;Carter L;Lipson M;Jones RT;Harsch M;Clark G;Marzinelli E;Rogers T;Rainsley E;Ciasto L;Waterman S;Thomas ER;Visbeck M, 2017, 'Tropical forcing of increased Southern Ocean climate variability revealed by a 140-year subantarctic temperature reconstruction', Climate of the Past, vol. 13, pp. 231 - 248, http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/cp-13-231-2017, ROS ID: 887651

Turney CS M;Palmer JG;Privat K;Thomas Z, 2017, 'Reconstructing atmospheric circulation over southern New Zealand: Establishment of modern westerly airflow 5500 years ago and implications for Southern Hemisphere Holocene climate change', Quaternary Science Reviews, vol. 159, pp. 77 - 87, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2016.12.017, ROS ID: 870007

Fogwill C;Golledge NR;Thomas ZA;Levy RH;Gasson GW;Naish TR;McKay RM;Kowalewski DE, 2016, 'Antarctic climate and ice sheet configuration during a peak-warmth Early Pliocene interglacial', Climate of the Past Discussions, http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/cp-2016-123, ROS ID: 862306

Palmer JG;Turney CS M;Cook ER;Fenwick P;Thomas Z;Helle G;Jones R;Clement A;Hogg A;Southon J;Bronk Ramsey C;Staff R;Muscheler R;Corrège T;Hua Q, 2016, 'Changes in El Niño – Southern Oscillation (ENSO) conditions during the Greenland Stadial 1 (GS-1) chronozone revealed by New Zealand tree-rings', Quaternary Science Reviews, vol. 153, pp. 139 - 155, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2016.10.003, ROS ID: 854811

Turney C;Fogwill C;Palmer J;van Sebille E;Thomas Z;McGlone M;Richardson S;Wilmshurst J;Fenwick P;Zunz V;Goosse H;Wilson K-J;Carter L;Lipson M;Jones RT;Harsch M;Clark G;Marzinelli E;Rogers T;Rainsley E;Ciasto L;Waterman S;Thomas E;Visbeck M, 2016, 'Tropical forcing of increased Southern Ocean climate variability revealed by a 140-year subantarctic temperature reconstruction', Climate of the Past Discussions, http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/cp-2016-114, ROS ID: 859630

Thomas ZA, 2016, 'Using natural archives to detect climate and environmental tipping points in the Earth System', Quaternary Science Reviews, vol. 152, pp. 60 - 71, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2016.09.026, ROS ID: 846749

Turney CS M;Jones RT;Lister D;Jones P;Williams AN;Hogg A;Thomas ZA;Compo GP;Yin X;Fogwill CJ;Palmer J;Colwell S;Allan R;Visbeck M, 2016, 'Anomalous mid-twentieth century atmospheric circulation change over the South Atlantic compared to the last 6000 years', Environmental Research Letters, vol. 11, http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/11/6/064009, ROS ID: 819075

Turney CS M;Jones RT;Thomas ZA;Palmer JG;Brown D, 2016, 'Extreme wet conditions coincident with Bronze Age abandonment of upland areas in Britain', Anthropocene, vol. 13, pp. 69 - 79, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ancene.2016.02.002, ROS ID: 805297

Turney CS M;Palmer J;Hogg A;Fogwill CJ;Jones RT;Bronk Ramsey C;Fenwick P;Grierson P;Wilmshurst J;O'Donnell A;Thomas ZA;Lipson M, 2016, 'Multidecadal variations in Southern Hemisphere atmospheric 14C: Evidence against a Southern Ocean sink at the end of the Little Ice Age CO2 anomaly', Global Biogeochemical Cycles, vol. 30, pp. 211 - 218, http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/2015GB005257, ROS ID: 788429

Turney CS M;Palmer J;Bronk Ramsey C;Adolphi F;Muscheler R;Hughen KA;Staff RA;Jones RT;Thomas ZA;Fogwill CJ;Hogg A, 2016, 'High-precision dating and correlation of ice, marine and terrestrial sequences spanning Heinrich Event 3: Testing mechanisms of interhemispheric change using New Zealand ancient kauri (Agathis austral', Quaternary Science Reviews, vol. 137, pp. 126 - 134, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2016.02.005, ROS ID: 794652

Turney CS M;Jones RT;Fogwill C;Hatton J;Williams AN;Hogg A;Thomas ZA;Palmer J;Mooney S;Reimer RW, 2016, 'A 250-year periodicity in Southern Hemisphere westerly winds over the last 2600 years', Climate of the Past, vol. 12, pp. 189 - 200, http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/cp-12-189-2016, ROS ID: 789106

Turney CS M;McGlone M;Palmer J;Fogwill C;Hogg A;Thomas ZA;Lipson M;Wilmshurst JM;Fenwick P;Jones RT;Hines B;Clark GF, 2016, 'Intensification of Southern Hemisphere westerly winds 2000-1000 years ago: Evidence from the subantarctic Campbell and Auckland Islands (52-50°S)', Journal of Quaternary Science, vol. 31, pp. 12 - 19, http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/jqs.2828, ROS ID: 782901

Suggitt AJ;Jones RT;Caseldine CJ;Huntley B;Stewart JR;Brooks SJ;Brown E;Fletcher D;Gillingham PK;Larwood J;Macgregor NA;Silva B;Thomas Z;Wilson RJ;Maclean IM D, 2015, 'A reply to ‘A meta-database of Holocene sediment cores for England: missing data’ (Tooley 2015)', Vegetation History and Archaeobotany, vol. 24, pp. 753 - 754, http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00334-015-0531-1, ROS ID: 795132

Suggitt AJ;Jones RT;Caseldine CJ;Huntley B;Stewart JR;Brooks SJ;Brown E;Fletcher D;Gillingham PK;Larwood J;Macgregor NA;Silva B;Thomas Z;Wilson RJ;Maclean IM D, 2015, 'A meta-database of Holocene sediment cores for England', Vegetation History and Archaeobotany, vol. 24, pp. 743 - 747, http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00334-015-0515-1, ROS ID: 795131

Turney CS M;Thomas ZA;Hutchinson DK;Bradshaw CJ A;Brook BW;England MH;Fogwill CJ;Jones RT;Palmer J;Hughen KA;Cooper A, 2015, 'Obliquity-driven expansion of North Atlantic sea ice during the last glacial', Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 42, pp. 10382 - 10390, http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/2015GL066344, ROS ID: 779584

Thomas ZA;Kwasniok F;Boulton CA;Cox PM;Jones RT;Lenton TM;Turney CS M, 2015, 'Early warnings and missed alarms for abrupt monsoon transitions', Climate of the Past, vol. 11, pp. 1621 - 1633, http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/cp-11-1621-2015, ROS ID: 819002

Thomas ZA;Kwasniok F;Boulton CA;Cox PM;Jones RT;Lenton TM;Turney CS M, 2015, 'Early warnings and missed alarms for abrupt monsoon transitions', Climate of the Past, vol. 11, pp. 1621 - 1633, http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/cp-11-1621-2015, ROS ID: 518849

Turney C;Jones R;Fogwill C;Hatton J;Williams AN;Hogg A;Thomas Z;Palmer J;Mooney S, 2015, 'A 250 year periodicity in Southern Hemisphere westerly winds over the last 2600 years', Climate of the Past Discussions, vol. 11, pp. 2159 - 2180, http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/cpd-11-2159-2015, ROS ID: 518848

Telfer MW;Thomas ZA;Breman E, 2012, 'Sand ramps in the Golden Gate Highlands National Park, South Africa: Evidence of periglacial aeolian activity during the last glacial', Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, vol. 313-314, pp. 59 - 69, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2011.10.008, ROS ID: 779641

Role: Former PhD student

Field of Research: Southern Hemisphere thermohaline circulation stability and effect on global climate: results from coupled modeling

Role: Former Professor
Field of Research: Paleaoclimatology
Email: c.turney@unsw.edu.au

Chris explores past climates and their relevance to future change. Working across the planet (from Antarctica to the tropics and up into the Arctic), he is developing new records of past climate that extend historical weather records over millennia. A major focus of Chris’ work is communicating how science works, communicating his team’s findings from the deep field. With climate models, Chris is using these reconstructions to explore the mechanisms, timing and impact of extreme change to help better improve our understanding of future abrupt climate change in Australia and globally.

If you would like to follow Chris and his team in the field, visit his popular science website www.christurney.com for updates and social media links under the banner ‘Intrepid Science’ and '@ProfChrisTurney'

Australasian Antarctic Expedition 2013-2014: www.spiritofmawson.com

Role: Former PhD student

Field of Research: Southern Hemisphere regional precipitation and climate variability: Extremes, trends, and prediction

Role: Former PhD student

Role: Former Post-Doctoral Research Fellow

Field of Research: Oceanography

Role: Former Honours Student
Email: seanwatt91@gmail.com

Sean completed a double degree at Macquarie University with majors in economics and climate science in 2013. Since then, he spent four years working at the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage in air pollution science and energy efficiency project management. While still holding an interest in economics, Sean has decided to pursue his interest in climate science further by trying to better understand extreme East Coast Lows in the Sydney region. Sean also has slightly more normal hobbies like trail running and too much coffee.

THESIS: What is the origin of the most extreme East Coast Lows (ECLs) hitting the Sydney region?

Studying the origin of the most extreme East Coast Lows that hit Sydney will assist in transforming our understanding of current climate extremes by helping to determine the types East Coast Lows that become the most damaging systems, and why that is the case. This will also potentially help forecasters to better understand which ECLs are more likely to become extreme storms, and this could help to provide greater lead times for forecasters to provide to the public to ensure maximum protection is applied to both life and property.

Role: Former PhD Student
Field of Research: Oceanography

David completed his PhD in physical oceanography at the Climate Change Research Centre (CCRC), University of New South Wales (UNSW). David’s research focused on the dynamics of coastal ocean processes around Antarctica. In particular, studied the mechanisms for which wind-generated coastal waves can lead to the transport of warm Circumpolar Deep Water onto the Antarctic continental shelf, which is important for understanding future Antarctic ice melt and global sea level rise

Role: Former Post-Doctoral Research Fellow

Field of Research: Climate Extremes

Role: Former Post-Doctoral Research Fellow

Field of Research: Climate Observations

Role: Former Visiting Masters Student

Field of Research: Oceanography

Steffie is a Masters Student from the IMAU institute at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, doing her Masters research at CCRC on the dynamics of the seperation of the East Australian Current.

Role: Former PhD student

Field of Research: Quantifying Ocean Mixing from Hydrographic Data

Role: Former Adjunct Senior Lecturer

Field of Research: Oceanography, climate, education

Role: Former Post Doctoral Research Fellow