ARC Discovery Project: From tropical cyclone world to real world: towards a theory of tropical cyclone formation
In Earth’s current climate,about eighty to ninety tropical cyclones form every year around the globe, but the reasons why cyclones form at this rate are unknown. This project uses a combination of theoretical techniques and numerical simulation to elucidate the links between large-scale climate and the rate of tropical cyclone formation. A series of climate model experiments are performed that also have the potential to improve confidence in our predictions of tropical cyclone incidence in a future, changed climate. This project commenced in February 2015, and follow-up publications continue to be produced.
ARC Discovery Project: Coupling Tropical Cyclone and Climate Physics with Ocean Waves (led by A. Babanin, Swinburne)
The project introduces explicit coupling of large-scale atmospheric and oceanic phenomena with the physics of surface waves. It is argued that without accounting for the wave effects directly, the physics of large-scale air-sea interactions is inaccurate and incomplete, this includes tropical cyclones and climate. The Australian national GCM ACCESS model is the test bed for the new physics. The new physics will be validated by means of predicting hurricane intensity, the most elusive of the hurricane forecast properties, and then applied to studies of climate phenomena. One of the main features of the climate to be explained is the globally increasing trends in winds and waves observed in the Investigators' recent Science paper. Several follow-up publications are planned.