Poster: Multiweek prediction & Attribution of the Black Saturday heatwave event in south-eastern Australia

ACCESS Workshop 2023 Posters
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Title

Multiweek prediction & Attribution of the Black Saturday heatwave event in south-eastern Australia

About

The Black Saturday heatwave event that occurred in late January-early February of year 2009 resulted in hundreds of human casualties and great economic losses in Victoria. In this study, we show that this event occurred with a persistent high pressure system over the Tasman Sea and a moderate La Nina condition in the tropical Pacific, which provided relatively long lead time predictability of about 10 days to this event. The record-breaking extremity of this event was skilfully captured by the Bureau of Meteorology’s dynamical subseasonal to seasonal forecast system, ACCESS-S1. Using ACCESS-S1, we conducted an experiment with a low CO2 concentration of the 20th century and initial conditions balanced to the low CO2 forcing. The comparison between the forecasts with the low CO2 vs current high CO2 suggests that about 10% of the heat over the south-eastern region was accountable for by the increase of the CO2 forcing since the beginning of the 20th century.

Poster

Poster-AbhikEtAl-A4.pdf (893.2 KB)

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Note: this topic is part of the 2023 ACCESS Community Workshop Poster session

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Love the Possum (and that is a form of treason for a New Zealander)

This is the study I was talking about that was looking at wildlife Refugia under fire in a future climate

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Hi @Aidan, This critically endangered possum species was affected by the 2009 bushfires. The black summer fires in 2019-20 might hammer them again when their population slowly recovers with support from Zoo Victoria and other conservation agencies.

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