Future changes in the precipitation associated with extreme East Coast Lows — Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society

Future changes in the precipitation associated with extreme East Coast Lows (#192)

Alejandro Di Luca 1 , Daniel Argueso 2 , Nicolas Jourdain 3 , Jason Evans 1
  1. Climate Change Research Centre, ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia
  2. Department of Physics, University of Balearic Islands, Palma de Mallorca, Spain
  3. Laboratoire de Glaciologie et de Géophysique de l'Environnement, Grenoble, France

Australian East Coast Lows (ECLs) are cyclones that either form or cross over the Tasman Sea adjacent to the Australian eastern seaboard. ECLs are responsible for much of the high-impact weather affecting the east coast of Australia including more than half of all major floods. Within ECLs, precipitation results from well organized structures along the warm and cold fronts but also from less structured convective systems that develop over unstable areas. The aim of this presentation is to assess future changes in extreme ECL’s precipitation using an ensemble of simulations that span a range of resolutions (including convection-permitting), physical schemes and large-scale boundary conditions that emulate different historical and future environments. Future changes in the most extreme precipitation rates show increases that are often consistent with the Clausius-Clapeyron relation but important differences appear depending on the specific future large-scale conditions considered. To gain more insight, we consider results obtained from further decomposing precipitation changes according to their level of organization based on an algorithm that separates precipitation in convective/stratiform types.

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