Online seminar by Nicola Maher from Australian National University
17 April 2025
KST 10:00
The Online seminar is being held in Room 1010 (Jasmin) – Integrated mechanical engineering building. Click here for the campus map.
Single model initial-condition large ensembles (SMILEs) are a powerful tool for separating internal climate variability and forced climate change. SMILEs consist of individual climate models that have been run many times (20-100) under identical external forcing from slightly perturbed initial conditions. Here, I present work that leverages the power of these tools to investigate future projections of temperature variability and the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), using the new multi model large ensemble archive dataset (MMLEAv2). Changes in temperature variability affect the frequency and intensity of extreme events, as well as the regional range of temperatures that ecosystems and society need to adapt to. First, I show results using rank-frequency analysis to evaluate the performance of eleven SMILEs against observations in the historical period, and use those that best represent observed regional variability to constrain projections of future temperature variability. Constrained projections from best-performing SMILEs still show large uncertainties in the intensity and the sign of variability change for large areas of the globe. Our results highlight poorly modelled regions where observed variability is not well represented such as Australia, South America, and Africa, where we find that multi-model mean projections may underestimate future variability change. Second, I show examples of other research using SMILEs to obtain a more accurate picture of ENSO. This work involves investigating future predictability of ENSO using a model analogues technique, understanding the risk of high-rainfall events in Australia, and preliminary results on future changes in ENSO SST variability in new stabilised climate runs. Overall, I demonstrate the power of SMILEs for investigating highly variable quantities such as variability and ENSO.
Join Zoom Meeting
https://pusan.zoom.us/j/82082080337?pwd=g6xpFevpaKoyyWVd9SW1GHT2XAbbvs.1
Meeting ID: 820 8208 0337
Passcode: 664157