The cyclonic wind hazard over the Australian region is determined using synthetic tropical cyclone event sets derived from general circulation models (GCMs) to provide guidance on the potential impacts of climate change. Cyclonic wind hazard (defined as the return period wind speed) is influenced by the frequency, intensity and spatial distribution of tropical cyclones, all of which may change under future climate regimes due to influences such as warmer sea surface temperatures and changes in the global circulation. Cyclonic wind hazard is evaluated using a statistical-parametric model of tropical cyclones - the Tropical Cyclone Risk Model (TCRM) - which can be used to simulate many thousands of years of cyclone activity. TCRM is used to generate synthetic tracks which are statistically similar to the input event set - either an historical record or other synthetic event set. After applying a parametric wind field to the simulated tracks, we use the aggregated wind fields to evaluate the return period wind speeds for three IPCC AR4 scenarios, and make comparisons to the corresponding average recurrence interval wind speed estimates for current climate simulations. Results from the analysis of two GCMs are presented and contrasted with hazard estimates based on the historical record of tropical cyclones in the Australian region.

These data have been generated by a high resolution climate Model using 6 drivers as specified in the file name. The model simulations cover the period 1960-2100. The data contains a large number of variables, for wind hazard studies the wind-related variables should be extracted. Author: CSIRO's CCAM high resolution model team Geographic extend: The simulations focus on Australia's climate Conditions using a cubic-conformal grid, the coarse part is used In places other than Australia (World).

The Australian National Coastal Vulnerability Assessment (NCVA) has been commissioned by the Federal Government (Department of Climate Change) to assess the risk to coastal communities from climate related hazards including sea-level rise, storm surge and severe wind from tropical cyclones. In addition to an understanding of the impact/risk posed by the current climate, we have also examined the change in risk under a range of future climate scenarios considering a number of periods up to the end of the 21st century. In collaboration with state and local governments and private industry, this assessment will provide information for application to policy decisions for, inter alia, land use, building codes, emergency management and insurance applications. The understanding of coastal vulnerability and risk is derived from a number of factors, including: the frequency and intensity of the hazard(s); community exposure and the relationship with stressors; vulnerability related to socio-economic factors; impacts that result from the interaction of those components; and capacity of communities, particularly vulnerable communities and groups, to plan, prepare, respond and recover from these impacts. These factors and resulting impacts from hazard events are often complex and often poorly known, but such complexity and uncertainty is not an excuse for inaction. Given these limitations, the NCVA has been undertaken using the best information available to understand the risk to coastal areas on a national scale, and to prioritise areas that will require more detailed assessment.

There is growing recognition of a relationship between geomagnetism and climate. This study uses continuous wavelet transforms to decompose geomagnetic, climatic and solar time series into their time-frequency components allowing both periodic and aperiodic correlations to be shown. Using 56 years of geomagnetic and climate data recorded in Canberra, Australia, correlations on time scales of 1 to 15 years are investigated. Wavelet analysis of temperature and geomagnetic data show correlations at 1-year and 2-5 year periods. There also appears to be weak correlation between rainfall and geomagnetism at a period of 11 years. This study is limited in temporal and spatial extent but demonstrates potential for further research in this field using wavelet transforms.

A national review of existing literature on palaeovalley systems and their groundwater resources in the arid and semi-arid parts of Australia. The review has been compiled by John Magee as the Milestone 3 output for the Palaeovalley Groundwater Project.

Drilling during Leg 119 (1988) and Leg 188 (2000; Sites 1165-1167) of the Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) provides direct evidence for long- and short-term changes in Cenozoic paleoenvironments in the Prydz Bay region. Cores from across the continental margin reveal that in preglacial times the present shelf was an alluvial plain system with austral conifer woodland in the Late Cretaceous that changed to cooler Nothofagus rainforest scrub by the middle to late Eocene (Site 1166). Earliest recovered evidence of nearby mountain glaciation is seen in late Eocene-age grain textures in fluvial sands. In the late Eocene to early Oligocene, Prydz Bay permanently shifted from being a fluvio-deltaic complex to an exclusively marine continental shelf environment. This transition is marked by a marine flooding surface later covered by overcompacted glacial sediments that denote the first advance of the ice sheet onto the shelf. Cores do not exist for the early Oligocene to early Miocene, and seismic data are used to infer the transition from a shallow to normal depth prograding continental shelf with submarine canyons on the slope and channel/levees on the rise.

In early 2011 a series of natural disasters impacted a large number of communities in Queensland. The flooding in the Brisbane region and the severe wind and storm surge experienced in the tully region caused widespread damage to infrastructure and disrupted both households and businesses. The full recovery costs over the next few years are expected to be considerable and will be a major drain on the resources of all levels of government and the insurance industry.

Legacy product - no abstract available

The 2011 United Nations climate change meeting in Durban provided an historic moment for CCS. After five years without progress, the Cancun Decision (2010) put in place a work program to address issues of concern before CCS could be included under the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and so allow projects in developing countries to earn Certified Emission Reductions (CERs). The program - consisting submissions, a synthesis report and workshop - concluded with the UNFCCC Secretariat producing draft 'modalities and procedures describing requirements for CCS projects under the CDM. The twenty page 'rulebook' provided the basis for negotiations in Durban. The challenging negotiations, lasting over 32 hours, concluded on 9th December with Parties agreeing to adopt final modalities and procedures for CCS under the CDM. These include provisions for participation requirements (including host country regulations), site selection and characterisation, risk and safety assessment, monitoring, liabilities, financial provision, environmental and social impact assessments, responsibilities for long term non-permanence, and timing of the CDM-project end. A key issue was the responsibility for any seepage of CO2 emissions in the long-term (non-permanence). The modalities and procedures separate responsibility for non-permanence from the liability for any local damages resulting from operation of the storage site. In relation to the former, they allow for the host country to determine the responsible entity, either the host country or the country purchasing the CERs. Note that a CER which incorporates responsibility for seepage will be less attractive to buyers. Thus a standard is established for managing CCS projects in developing countries, which will ensure a high level of environmental protection and is workable for projects. It sets an important precedent for the inclusion of CCS into other support mechanisms.

Tropical cyclones pose a significant threat to islands in the tropical western Pacific. The extreme winds from these severe storms can cause extensive damage to housing, infrastructure and food production. As part of the Pacific Climate Change Science Program (PCCSP), Geoscience Australia assessed the wind hazard posed by tropical cyclones for 14 islands in the western Pacific and East Timor. The wind hazard was assessed for both the current climate and for the future climate under the A2 SRES emission scenario. Wind hazard maps were generated using Geoscience Australia's Tropical Cyclone Risk Model (TCRM) that applies a statistical-parametric process to estimate return period wind speeds. To obtain a robust estimate of wind hazard from a short historical track record, TCRM produces several thousand years worth of tracks that are statistically similar to the input track dataset. The model then applies a parametric wind profile to these tracks and fits a Generalized Extreme Value distribution to the maximum wind speeds at each location. To estimate how the hazard may change in the future, tracks of Tropical Cyclone-Like Vortices (TCLVs) detected in dynamically downscaled global climate model are used as input into TCRM. This is performed for four downscaled global climate models for two twenty year periods centered on 1990 and 2090 under the A2 SRES emission scenario. This study provides the first detailed assessment of the current wind hazard for this region, despite the fact that these counties are both highly exposed and vulnerable to these severe storms. The hazard climate projections should be treated with caution due to known deficiencies in the global climate models and poor agreement between models of the hazard projections. However, keeping these limitations in mind, the results suggest that the wind hazard will decrease north of 20º latitude in the South Pacific by 2090.