Australian Severe Weather Forum

Well G'day folks, Thought I'd do a similar sort of information thing for my PhD to that which I did for honours given that i've officially started.

Next week is the 9th Internation Conference on Southern Hemisphere Meteorology and Oceanography and i'm doing a presentation on the stuff from my honours year, so if anyone is going along look forward to seeing you there. As for my PhD, its time I told you what I'm doing:

Impacts of climate variability and change on the severe weather environment in Australia
This project will investigate the impact of inter-annual climate variations and longer term climate change on the probability of severe weather occurrence in the Australian region. It will focus on large-scale environmental factors conducive to the formation of thunderstorms and severe weather. Observational data will be used to develop relationships between the frequency of occurrence of severe weather, such as hail, high rainfall and damaging winds, and nearby environmental conditions. These relationships will then be tested in regional climate model simulations for present day and future conditions to assess the possible impacts of climate change on the severe weather environment.

As I progress into the project Ill try and keep you all updated of the happenings and results as much as possible...its a big project to deal with, intially im going to be dealing with Bureau Reports, Conditional Sounds and Lightning Data to try and determine what climatic conditions result in severe thunderstorms based on reanalysis data, and from there build a set of thresholds to detect future dates. It should be interesting.