BAMOS Vol 29 No.2 Q2 2016

AMOS

AustralianMeteorological & OceanographicSociety

Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological & Oceanographic Society Vol 29, No. 2, 2016 ISSN 1035-6576

Contents Editorial...........................................................................................................................................................................27 President’s Column.........................................................................................................................................................28 News...............................................................................................................................................................................29 Comment........................................................................................................................................................................34 Articles.................................................................................................................................................................... 36–41 Weather in literature quiz with Matthias Tomczak........................................................................................................39 Obituary: Dr. Gary Meyers: a man of science and humanity.........................................................................................42 The Research Corner with Damien Irving: Keeping up with Continuum......................................................................46 Charts from the Past with Blair Trewin: 29 March, 1940...............................................................................................48

ISSN 1035-6576 Cover picture: A bleached Heron Reef in April this year.

Image: ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies.

Unless specifically stated to the contrary, views expressed in the Bulletin are the personal views of the authors, and do not represent the views of the Society or any other organisation or institution to which the author(s) may be affiliated.

Editorial

Calm before the storm With spring now upon us, thoughts turn to weekends spent at the beach, enjoying blue skies and a bit of sunshine. For me, I’m lucky to live not far from the beach in Sydney, but coastal living isn’t without its downfalls. Within the first few days of winter our house was battered by storms as an East Coast Low hit NSW. Thankfully we aren’t in an area where damage was high, but unfortunately, there were lives lost due to the wild conditions. Flooding occurred statewide, and those closer to the ocean were evacuated as king tides brought widespread coastal destruction—the image of a backyard pool in Collaroy falling off an eroded cliff into the ocean is iconic of the damage caused.

In this issue of BAMOS, AMOS President Mary Voice writes on the work those in the AMOS sciences should be proud of, pointing to the effectiveness of early-warning systems and extreme weather alerts in saving lives. Acacia Pepler also takes us through what we are starting to learn about East Coast Lows. She wrote as the newly launched Journal of Southern Hemisphere Earth Systems Science (JSHESS)—formerly AMOJ—published a special issue on the subject.

Yet, it wasn’t all about wild, stormy weather this winter: NASA recently announced that July was the hottest July on record, with the month marking the 10th record-breaking month in a row globally. The effects of climate change are obvious in nature as many ecosystems are not resilient to the rapid pace of which it is occurring on Earth. Kelp forests on the southwest coast of Australia are now gone, and many parts of the Great Barrier Reef suffered massive bleaching earlier in the year. It is the worst bleaching event on record, which has left chunks of the reef dead, or in ill-health. And that’s just part of what I know about recent climate change effects—many of you know a lot more.

While we’re on the topic, the 2016 AMOS School Art Competition is now in full swing, with entries closing soon. Entries are coming in fast, but we can always take more—please see the flyer within this issue of BAMOS and let any school-age children you know, know! There are some great prizes on offer for both winners and their schools.

In this issue we also welcome Matthias Tomczak’s weather in literature quiz. Look out for Matthias in each issue from now on as he puts your literary knowledge to the test with a brief glimpse of a passage from a popular publication.

Can you guess the novel that the passage is from in this issue?

We are also now more than halfway between AMOS conferences. Submissions for abstracts have just closed, so check on your emails for more news as it comes to hand.

Only 5 months to go til we all meet again!

Melissa Lyne Editor

I admit I’m not a scientist. While my interests at school were in science and maths, I excelled more in visual arts, music and languages. But how many of the AMOS community enjoyed, and perhaps were even successful in, the arts at school? I know that at least one other BAMOS Editor was also the recipient of their high school’s art prize...

I’ve always believed that art and science go hand-inhand—I’ve even written a little bit about a couple of examples within this issue.

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A view south of Bronte beach in Sydney on 3 June, a day before an East Coast Low battered the NSW coast. Image: Melissa Lyne.

President’s Column

Proud to be meteorologists, atmospheric scientists, hydrologists, oceanographers, and help save lives As I write this report, (June 2016—Ed.) weather continues to happen, some of it extreme: •

Record global & Australian temperatures through 2016 so far;

•

The Northern Hemisphere had a record low snow coverage in its 2016 spring (March, April, and May), and, according to NSIDC, Arctic sea ice cover was scarily low in May (graph below);

•

Three years of what could be called miserly monsoon over northeastern Australia (QLD);

•

Up to 25% of average yearly rainfall on parts of the east coast in early June;

•

In spite of coastal and central rain, drought persists in parts of central QLD (now three years long, although rain is crossing the area as I write);

•

Coastal damage and flooding on Australia’s eastern seaboard, just as we sack our top class oceanographers.

In the U.S., coastal erosion problems, and the fact that nearly half of hurricane deaths are due to storm surge, have prompted recent research into new services (from both the USGS and NOAA). These include new forecasting methods for coastal waves and accompanying beach changes, as well as realtime storm surge inundation maps. Let us hope that Australia is not depriving itself of the opportunity to develop similar new services for our at-risk coastal communities.

Modern early-warning systems and extreme weather alerts, such as those that gave excellent warning of the recent east coast lows, are possible only because of longterm commitment to meteorological and oceanographic

Arctic sea ice was low in May. Graph: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/.

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research. Accompanied and followed by concerned and public-spirited people, of humanitarian disposition, who developed public forecasting services. Few of us realise how big a difference they have made to loss of life and property. When did you last hear of many lives lost from an Australian tropical cyclone or a shipwreck on the Australian coast? And yet both events were common in the past.

A link between Australia and the development of forecasting services The Royal Charter steam clipper left Melbourne in August 1859 bound for Liverpool in the UK, containing gold from our gold rush and returning passengers. Two months later and nearly home, in a fierce gale and huge swell, she foundered on the rocks off Anglesey, with enormous loss of life. At the time, loss of ships and lives was huge in British waters. But after this disaster, ViceAdmiral FitzRoy was given the authority to start issuing storm warnings, using the new electric telegraph. This was the fore-runner of modern, organised meteorological and oceanographic services for public benefit. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/the-scienceof-weather-forecasting-the-pioneer-who-founded-themet-office-10208119.html If it were not for the ongoing research and service developments since 1859, YOU might know someone killed in a cyclone, or a flood or a shipwreck, maybe even someone in your family. You might STILL know someone badly affected by a big flood or a bushfire!!!

I hope we are all proud to be meteorologists (atmospheric scientists, weather forecasters, climate specialists, pollution specialists, etc), hydrologists and oceanographers who help save lives. I am. And there is more work to do.

We live in a land downunder, and girt by sea (perhaps with the third largest maritime jurisdiction in the world).

We inhabit a sunburnt country, a land of droughts and flooding rains (witness the last few years). That presents special opportunities and special challenges for innovation and sustainability—distance, counter-season markets, coping with a highly variable climate, the future of our coasts, tourism or devastation on the Great Barrier reef, how/can a food-bowl develop in northern Australia, water for agriculture-people-industry-environment, liveable economy-positive cities in challenging landscapes, etc. Not to mention managing economic transitions and energyuse transitions. Our research and services communities can help with these challenges, and the benefit to cost ratio has been shown to be high. Another reason to be proud,

President’s Column and to continue our efforts for new insights and ongoing improvements to services.

And finally another reason for our AMOS community to be proud: congratulations to Matthew England and Harry Hendon who have recently been named in the 2016 Class of AGU Fellows. Also, two distinguished Fellows of AMOS have recently been elected as Fellows of the Australian

Academy of Science: Neville Nicholls and Ian Allison were inducted into the Academy in May. Congratulations to both Neville and Ian.

Mary Voice

News

AMOS Fellows elected to Academy Two distinguished Fellows of AMOS have recently been elected as Fellows of the Australian Academy of Science (AAS). Professor Neville Nicholls FAA FAMOS and Dr. Ian Allison AO FAA FAMOS were inducted into the Academy at a ceremony in Canberra on 24 May. They join six other AMOS Fellows who are members of the Academy.

Neville Nicholls was President of AMOS in 2010–11. He was the recipient of the AMOS Priestley Medal in 1987 and was elected to the AMOS Fellowship in 2013. He has also received many other professional awards including the FitzRoy Prize of the Royal Meteorological Society in 2005 and Fellowship of the American Geophysical Union in 2014.

Neville began his career as a Cadet Meteorologist in the Bureau of Meteorology in 1970 and retired from the Bureau as Senior Principal Research Scientist and Leader of the Climate Forecasting Group in the BMRC (Bureau of Meteorology Research Centre) in 2005. He then joined Monash University as a Professorial Fellow in the School of Geography and Environmental Science until 2014 and continues as Emeritus Professor in the School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment.

Throughout his Bureau career, Neville focussed on building the scientific basis for climate forecasting. He is widely recognised as the world expert on the nature, causes, predictability and impacts of inter-annual climate variability in Australia and the Australian region. His research has provided the basis for operational prediction of climate variations and their impacts including droughts, crop yields and bushfire and tropical cyclone activity.

He also led the development of high quality climate data sets for Australia and played a key role in several IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) assessments focussed especially on long-term changes in weather and climate extremes. Neville has published some 250 books, book chapters and journal and other papers.

Since moving to Monash, he has played an increasingly Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society Vol. 29 page 29

New AAS Fellows: Prof. Neville Nicholls and Dr. Ian Allison. Image: John Zillman. important role in education and public communication of science and especially in strengthening the impact and image of the AMOS community.

In addition to his Academy Fellowship, Ian Allison has been the recipient of many other honours and awards, including the Australian Antarctic Medal in 1988, Doctor of Science (Honoris Causa) from the University of Tasmania in 2009 and Officer in the Order of Australia in 2014. He was elected to Fellowship of AMOS in 2016 and was also selected as 2016 Tasmanian Senior Australian of the Year.

Ian began his career as a Glaciologist in the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD), wintering at Mawson Base in 1969. He finished his AAD career as Senior Principal Research Scientist and Leader of the Division’s Ice, Ocean, Atmosphere and Climate Program in 2010. He now serves as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Tasmania and Honorary Research Associate at the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre.

News Ian is recognised nationally and internationally as an outstanding leader in Antarctic glaciological research and in the planning and coordination of major international polar research programs. His personal research has greatly advanced our understanding of the role of Antarctica in global climate. He has demonstrated the heterogeneity of Antarctic pack-ice and the importance of ice drift and ocean interaction to sea-ice growth. He has been an outstanding leader of the Australian Antarctic Program and international polar research collaboration including as co-chair of the peak committee responsible for the 2007–08 International Polar Year. He was also a major contributor to several IPCC assessments of climate change and co-led (with the late Mike Raupach) the Working Groups which prepared the Academy’s 2010 and 2015 Q&A publications on the Science of Climate Change. He has also published some 170 books, monographs, refereed journal articles and other papers.

Both new Academy Fellows are widely known and admired in the AMOS community for their life-long dedication to research and their personal contribution to better scientific understanding of climate. In extending the

warm congratulations of AMOS to its new Academicians, AMOS President, Mary Voice, expressed her hope that their election would further lift community recognition of the importance of meteorological and oceanographic science and services to Australia and enhance the visibility and influence of AMOS in the Academy and the broader scientific community.

Note: New Academy Fellows presented their work at ‘Science at the Shine Dome’ in Canberra to mark their election to the Academy. Information about all the Fellows elected in 2016 can be found at: https://www.science.org. au/fellowship, while Ian’s and Neville’s presentations can be viewed at the following addresses: Ian Allison: Antarctic ice and snow in the global climate system https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzUTwHiuG0s Neville Nicholls: El Niño: present, past, future https://w w w.youtub e.com/watch?v=OpVGgbDh V P w & i n d e x = 1 5 & l i s t = P L 9 D f J T x C Pa X L XQ d m C50YRycXpvxmOQD_

Icy celebration of winter solstice Australian Antarctic Division

on Macquarie Island, expeditioners dashed into the chilly surf.

Mawson Station Leader, Jenny Wressell, said wintering crews mark the winter solstice with a range of activities including games, pantomimes and a gourmet dinner.

“This year the team of 14 people at Mawson will take part in a mini-Olympic games, with events ranging from ten pin bowling to ice cave construction,” Ms. Wressell said.

Midwinter celebrations are a tradition dating back more than a century to Sir Douglas Mawson’s heroic era of exploration.

Ms. Wressell said midwinter activities boost team morale during the long, dark winter days.

“During the depths of winter the sun doesn’t appear above the horizon, so we essentially have six weeks where we only have twilight for a few hours a day,” she said.

Mawson expeditioner, Shane Ness, takes a dip. Image: Jenny Wressell/ Australian Antarctic Division.

“Midwinter’s day is really a turning point for us - we celebrate the fact we’ve made it through the shortest day and look forward to seeing the sun again.”

A swift swim in icy waters marked the passage of midwinter for expeditioners at Australia’s Antarctic and sub Antarctic stations.

Staff at Australian Antarctic Division headquarters in Kingston, Tasmania also participated in a midwinter swim in the less icy waters of Blackmans Bay.

Teams at Casey, Davis and Mawson stations cut a hole in the sea ice and plunged into the Southern Ocean, while

Kingston staff also held a memorial ceremony for Australian Antarctic personnel who have died in Antarctica.

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News

New IAMAS correspondent for Australia Associate Professor Lisa Alexander at the Climate Change Research Centre and ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science, University of New South Wales, is the new Australian correspondent for the International Association of Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences (IAMAS). The position was previously held by Dr. Tom Beer, a current AMOS Fellow. Thank you for your many years of dedicated service, Tom, and congratulations on your new role, Lisa!—Ed. What is your role on the IAMAS Executive?

I’m a ‘member at large’. According to Wikipedia this is someone who is appointed to represent the whole membership of an organisation (i.e. IAMAS), rather than a subset of that membership. Yes I had to look it up too when I was appointed!

What in your career led you to this role?

IAMAS Australian correspondent, Assoc. Prof. Lisa Alexander.

I gave an invited presentation on global observed changes in extremes of temperature and precipitation at the IAMAS conference in Beijing in 2005 and since then I have been involved in organising several IUGG/IAMAS symposia focussed weather and climate extremes. I guess my other roles within WMO (leading an Expert Team within the Commission for Climatology) and WCRP (co-leading the Grand Challenge on Extremes) in addition to my role as lead author on the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report would also have helped with getting this role.

more women to the organisation. The IAMAS Bureau are already trying to develop ways in which they can do this.

Do you have any plans for the next IAMAS Scientific Assembly in Capetown in August 2017?

I think to continue to be relevant, international organisations need to move with the times. That probably means embracing the technology used by younger generations whilst still ensuring the integrity that these organisations have built up over decades. Both are possible.

I will be co-leading a symposium on high-impact weather and climate extremes.

How do you see IAMAS developing between now and the 2019 General Assembly in Montreal in 2019?

I think IAMAS will need to focus more on early career researchers, developing country scientists and attracting

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Do you think international organisations are still relevant now that we have instant global communication?

What advice would you give an undergraduate wanting to study climate?

If you love it, do it!

The AMOS Melbourne Centre Gliding Day Gain a bird’s eye view of meteorology at the controls of a sleek, modern two-seat glider

Cost: $130 (up to 30 minutes in the air from a 3,000 ft launch)

Sat 10th September 2016 Gliding Club of Victoria, Benalla Take a look at www.glidingclub.org.au

INFO & SIGN-UP: MATTHEW.WOODHOUSE@GMAIL.COM

Global Climate Change Week, 10–16 October 2016 In Mongolia there’s a phenomenon called “dzud”: a drought in the summer and an extremely cold winter. Image: Asian Development Bank, shared under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 https://creativecommons. org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/.

Global Climate Change Week (GCCW) aims to encourage academic communities – including academics, students, and professional staff at universities – in all disciplines and countries to engage with each other, their communities, and policy makers on climate change action and solutions.

Held annually in October, GCCW provides an openended framework for voluntary activities aimed at raising

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awareness, inspiring behaviour change, and driving political transformation in relation to climate policy. As of 13 August there were 152 registrations, from 43 countries.

For more information: http://globalclimatechangeweek. com/about-gccw/

Bureau of Meteorology R & D Annual Workshop 2016 First Announcement

The Research and Development Branch of the Bureau of Meteorology is pleased to announce its Annual workshop is to be held at the Head office of the Bureau of Meteorology 700 Collins Street, Docklands from the 5-9 December 2016. The Workshop brings together Australian experts from the Bureau of Meteorology, CSIRO, the Universities and Research Centres, as well as a number of prominent overseas scientists. This year's Workshop will focus on Data Assimilation across numerous themes. It will address the challenges and vision for the future of this relatively large application of the scientific method. Themes to be discussed include:- • • • • • • • •

Ensemble DA

Atmospheric DA Satellite DA Oceanic DA Land DA Reanalysis/Coupled DA Forecast Sensitivity Advanced Methods and Generalised Model Data Fusion

Early career scientists are encouraged to attend the Student Workshop (1-2 December 2016) being held in conjunction with this five day meeting.

Dates and venue: 1-2 December 2016 – Student Workshop on Data Assimilation 5-9 December 2016 – Annual R & D workshop on Data Assimilation Bureau of Meteorology, 700 Collins Street, Melbourne.

Program: To be announced. Speakers are by invitation.

International speakers include :- Drs Craig Bishop NRL USA, Dr Clara Draper, NASSA Goddard USA, Dr Jeffrey Anderson, UCAR USA, Dr Adam Clayton, UKMO, Dr Mark Buehner Environ, Canada, Dr Tijana Janjic Univ. of Munich.

Registration: Free. Registration is required for attendance. Registration details to be announced.

Website: http://wdev.bom.gov.au/research/workshop/2016/ Contact : Ms V Jemmeson v.jemmeson@bom.gov.au

Scientific Committee: Peter Steinle (Convenor), Jin Lee, Yonghong Yin, Imitaz Dharssi, Pavel Sakov, Ms Val Jemmeson (Bureau of Meteorology) Georg Gottwald (USyd), Terry O'Kane CSIRO

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Oceanographic Society Vol. 29 page 33

30th June 2016

Comment

Nine years after the Pasha Bulker storm, we’re finally getting a handle on East Coast Lows Acacia Pepler

Climate Climate Change Research Centre, University of NSW

of the Journal of Southern Hemisphere Earth Systems Science highlights some of the things we’ve learned1.

What do we know?

There are seven papers in the special issue, covering a broad range of topics.

Danielle Verdon-Kidd and her colleagues look back at the Pasha Bulker storm and reflect on the scale of the impacts, as well as issues for future flood planning, such as improved education about the dangers of entering floodwaters2.

A group from the Bureau of Meteorology (including myself) has also developed a new online database of East Coast Lows over the past 60 years, to help emergency managers look back on the impacts of past storms or find out how many of the big events they remember were actually ECLs3.

The bow of the shipwrecked Pasha Bulker at Nobbys Beach, Newcastle, NSW. Image: John Valentine (original link: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ pominoz68/540479824), shared under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/).

In June 2007, Australia was pummelled by five East Coast Lows. The most significant of them, which struck on June 8-9, is still referred to as the “Pasha Bulker” storm, after the 76,000-tonne bulk carrier that ran aground near Newcastle. The storm caused major flooding, strong winds, high seas and A$1.6 billion in damage, making it Australia’s eighth most expensive disaster in the last 50 years.

East Coast Lows (ECLs) have been important features of the eastern seaboard for centuries, with the first case studies published back in 1954. But by June 2007 it had been ten years since the last serious scientific look at these storms. The damage suffered that month made it clear how much we still didn’t know about these weather systems, let alone about how they might behave in the future.

Going back still further, Stuart Browning and Ian Goodwin have looked at what sorts of ocean and atmospheric conditions influence East Coast Lows, as these storms tend not to be as strongly affected by big climate drivers such as La Niña4. This research has helped to extend the record of East Coast Lows back to the 19th century and found that the numbers of ECLs can vary quite a lot over decades and longer. Interestingly, the past few decades (up to 2014) have been a period of relatively low activity.

Anthony Kiem and his colleagues have delved into the question of how coastal rainfall patterns and impacts can change, depending on the “type” of ECL that happens5.

This work, as well as the work by Browning and Goodwin, highlights how important it is to consider the different types of East Coast Lows—a storm that causes heavy rain in the Northern Rivers looks very different to one that brings downpours to Gippsland, and these might also change in different ways over time. This teases out important detail that can be washed out in studies that lump all storms in together.

Instead of a whole bunch of scientists going off and doing their own thing, we formed the Eastern Seaboard Climate Change Initiative, in which local universities and state and federal governments could work together to identify the biggest scientific questions for the eastern seaboard, and start to solve them.

Before we can use climate models to assess how East Coast Lows and their impacts may change on the eastern seaboard, we need to know whether our models are doing a good job. So Alejandro Di Luca and colleagues have

Nine years and a slew of research papers later, we know a lot more about ECLs than we once did. We have built a strong research network that can expand our knowledge still further and put it into practice. A recent special issue

1 h t t p : / / w w w. b o m . g o v. a u / j s h e s s / d o c s / 2 0 1 6 / editorsnoteJul2016.pdf

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2

http://www.bom.gov.au/jshess/docs/2016/vernonkidd.pdf

3

http://www.bom.gov.au/jshess/docs/2016/pepler.pdf

4

http://www.bom.gov.au/jshess/docs/2016/browning.pdf

5

http://www.bom.gov.au/jshess/docs/2016/kiem.pdf

Comment

Sydney was hit by East Coast Lows in June. A helicopter searches for a man lost whilst swimming in king tides off Bondi, 6 June 2016. Image: Melissa Lyne. assessed how well the NARCliM regional climate model ensemble is able to represent East Coast Lows6.

They found that regional models have real benefits over global climate models, particularly for the most extreme events.

Despite these promising results, studies led by Nadeeka Parana Manage7 and Natalie Lockart8 found that there is still a way to go before the regional models produce data of the quality needed for simulating river flows and dam levels, and how future changes to storm patterns might affect these.

So what’s next?

But there are still a lot of things we don’t know. The papers in this issue are a start, but research continues and our group has many more questions left to answer. These include how ECLs have changed in the more distant past; how sea surface temperatures influence their frequency and impacts; and how changes in ECLs and other climate processes can affect our water security.

A whole bunch of research is also about to start into how ECLs interact with other climate extremes now and into the future, as part of the NSW Government’s Climate Change Impacts and Extreme Climate Events research programs and the Australian government’s National Environmental Science Program.

We know a lot more than we did nine years ago about things like how the upper atmosphere influences East Coast Lows, and how severe floods and East Coast Lows have changed over the past century. We are also starting to get a handle on how they may change in the future.

Climate change is expected to reduce their frequency during the cool months May—October (which is when they currently happen most often), but potentially make them more common during the warmer months.

So read the articles9, have a taste and watch this space: there are still many more questions and researchers from around the country are working together to answer them, to help us better understand the special, complex climate of the eastern seaboard of Australia.

6

http://www.bom.gov.au/jshess/docs/2016/diluca.pdf

9

7

http://www.bom.gov.au/jshess/docs/2016/paranamanage.pdf

8

http://www.bom.gov.au/jshess/docs/2016/lockart.pdf

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This article orginally appeared in The Conversation, 10 August 2016: https://theconversation.com/nine-years-afterthe-pasha-bulker-storm-were-finally-getting-a-handle-oneast-coast-lows-63510. http://www.bom.gov.au/jshess/papers.php?year=2016

Article

Educating educators about climate fundamentals Stephanie Downes

Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems CRC (ACE CRC)

Simple ocean acidification experiment: Dr Andrew Lenton (CSIRO) and a volunteer from the audience demonstrate how the pH of water can be reduced (i.e., made more acidic) by exhaling carbon through a straw into an alkaline solution- in this case, the water turned from blue to yellow. Image: Stephanie Downes.

Boosting STEM subjects in schools can be tackled in numerous ways, one of which is integrating hot topics into the classroom such as CLIMATE CHANGE. But the basic climate concepts and key findings of climate research are often misunderstood as the general public and school students try to sift through the endless science perspectives often presented in the media. In May and June 2016, the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems CRC (ACE CRC) hosted a four-part ‘Climate101’ lecture series at the University of Tasmania’s Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies.

The lectures targeted those involved in science education and outreach, and anyone with an interest in climate science. Prof. Nathan Bindoff (UTas; ACE CRC; CSIRO) kicked off the series with his lecture “How we know the

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climate is changing and the role of humans”, providing a clear and concise demonstration of anthropogenic climate change using results from the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report. In the second lecture, “ The global carbon cycle: changes and impacts”, Dr. Andrew Lenton from CSIRO taught the audience about the sources of carbon that operate on different timescales (e.g., cows breathing versus carbon stored over millennial timescales in sediments). Dr. Lenton noted that: “ocean acidification is the predictable and measureable consequence of rising atmospheric CO2”, and that major carbon changes were unevenly distributed across the global ocean. The third lecture by Dr. Stephanie Downes (ACE CRC), titled “Observing and modelling the ocean and atmosphere” gave a background on how and why the atmosphere circulates on much faster timescales than the ocean, and why the latter is so difficult to measure consistently and continuously over decadal periods. Dr. Mark Curran (Australian Antarctic Division; ACE CRC) presented the “how-to” guide of planning, collecting, and analysing ice cores in his lecture, “Reconstructing our climate history from ice cores”. Dr. Curran wowed the audience with Antarctic footage and photos highlighting the sheer effort involved in pulling together multi-million dollar field work in a remote location with several international partners to acquire a single ice core. He then showed how that precious ice core can reveal thousands of years of the Earth’s climate.

The four lecturers used several fieldwork photos, videos of atmospheric and oceanic processes, hands-on experiments and equipment displays. Feedback from the audience was very positive—they appreciated that the lectureres clearly stated the facts from research and theory across the globe.

Each lecture was recorded live (courtesy of UTas Events and made indefinitely available at UTas Livestream: http://livestream.com/UniversityofTasmania/climate101) All lecture material was made available to freely download for general interest and/or as a classroom resource at: http://acecrc.org.au/climate101. Whilst the lecture theatre attendance during Hobart’s cold winter weather was low in numbers, the four lectures combined have been viewed online close to 900 times to date. Clearly there is genuine interest in understanding what climate change is all about and the need to work towards adapting to an ever-evolving climate.

Undergraduate Summer Scholarships in Climate Science Scholarships are available to provide outstanding undergraduate students an introduction to cutting-edge climate science research at one of our five universities, or our national partners- CSIRO and the Department of the Environment.

Students should be in their second, third, or post-honours year and interested in pursuing a postgraduate degree in climate science.

Students will conduct supervised research for a six-week period during the summer break.

The scholarships are valued at $3,800 for the six-week research project.

For details of projects available during the 2016/17 summer, and instructions on how to apply, visit‌ https://www.climatescience.org.au/content/331undergraduate-summer-research-scholarships

For further information, contact Graduate Director Dr Melissa Hart: melissa.hart@unsw.edu.au

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Article

Post-Paris COP21 climate forum Louise Wilson and Paul Fluids

Speakers at the public event. Image: Tim Morrow.

The outcomes of last year’s Paris COP21 Climate talks were discussed at a free public event, on 26 February, hosted by the AMOS Melbourne Centre and the National Resources Conservation League of Victoria. A trio of speakers with expertise in climate science, carbon budgeting, insurance, finance and the law gathered to talk about the COP21 outcomes and their impacts on the broader community.

The event was chaired by Professor Ross Garnaut, who brought his expertise on economics and renewable energy to the panel.

Associate Professor Malte Meinshausen, the Director of the Australian-German College at The University of Melbourne and scientific advisor to the German Environmental Ministry on international climate change negotiations, was the first speaker. Malte participated in the actual Paris negotiations and presented the various agreements to limit global average temperature to below 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels. While the Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) negotiated at Paris represent a good starting point, they alone are insufficient to limit warming to 2 degrees.

Additional emission reductions must be negotiated or enhanced mitigation must occur - before 2030 to give the best chances of staying below the agreed limit.

Malte highlighted the fact that the later global emission reductions are started, the more rapid the rate of future

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reductions will be required, in order to meet the 2 degree target. Meeting this target requires net zero carbon emissions between 2050 and 2100. Malte also highlighted the fact that the 2 degree target itself is not ‘safe’, and gave an example of various studies which estimate a millennial sea level rise of between 3-13 metres based on such a target.

After a brief interlude from Professor Garnaut, who kept us updated with the latest advances in renewable energy and the economic implications this has on current and future projected coal use, Professor Garnaut introduced the next speaker - Dr Nick Wood. After completing a PhD in Nuclear Reactor Technology and post-doctoral research in atmospheric chemistry, Nick has spent more than two decades advising governments and corporations on climate policy. Nick showcased how much climate model projection data is now widely available, and highlighted that while smart companies are already using it to aid in their risk assessments, many companies are still oblivious to the risks. A section of COP21 was dedicated to better disseminating the information on insurance and risk transfer in order to better develop risk management strategies. Michael Bloomberg has been assigned to head this task force on climate related financial disclosures. A key point communicated by Nick is that climate change poses significant financial problems for areas such as key

Article infrastructure capacity and development, as past events no longer serve as useful predictors of future events.

Sarah Barker, an internationally recognised expert on governance of climate change under corporations and securities laws, was the final speaker. Sarah sits on the trustee board of one of Australia’s largest pension funds, the $24 billion ESS Super, and is a visiting fellow at the Smith School of Enterprises & the Environment at Oxford University. She was the only global private practice lawyer invited to the United Nations Investor Summit on Climate Risk held in January 2016 in New York. Sarah began by discussing how climate change has moved from a purely environmental or ethical issue to become a significant economic one, and thus there are legal consequences for entities that continue to ignore it. Corporate directors are now compelled to take action. Sarah discussed the recent World Economic Forum event (which proceeded COP21) and how climate change and its associated impacts were the key risks identified by the group. Sarah gave a review of how regulators in the US and EU are responding by demanding disclosure of climate-related risk exposures and gave a recent example of coal company employees suing their pension fund board for failing to divest their fund away from shares in their companies (which have dramatically fallen). Sarah’s key message for the audience was to ensure that your superannuation fund takes its exposure to climate risk seriously, and advised switching funds if necessary. Sarah also emphasised that super funds typically receive very little correspondence from members, so any approaches made to the board regarding climate risk exposure – such as letters of concern from members will have a large impact.

A lengthy and informative Q&A session followed with contributions from current and retired eminent scientists, leaders of community action groups and members of the farming community. During the Q&A session Ross Garnaut commented how Chinese emissions and coal consumption has recently levelled off and suggested that these will soon decline, as China is rapidly embracing battery technology to store renewable energy to solve its urban pollution problem. The event was brought to a close 15 minutes after the designated end of the Q&A with many audience members still with their hands in the air.

AMOS would like to again thank the National Resources Conservation League of Victoria for co-sponsoring the event, Deakin Edge and its partners who facilitated the event, the Sustainable Living Festival, Jeanette Dargaville for her invaluable assistance, as well as the panel of speakers who made the event such an informative and timely one.

Some of the audience members at the public event. Image: Tim Morrow.

Weather in literature quiz with Matthias Tomczak Welcome to the first in a BAMOS series of weatherrelated literature quizzes. Can you guess which book the following passage is from?

The answer will be printed in the next issue of BAMOS. “Across the Atlantic, there was a barometric minimum; it wandered eastward, approaching a maximum that resided above Russia, and did not betray the inclination to evade it northwards. The isotherms and isothers did their duty. The air temperature stood in a proper relation to the mean annual temperature, the temperature of the coldest as well as the warmest month and the aperiodic monthly temperature variation. The rising and setting

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of the sun, the moon, the change of light of the moon, of Venus, the Saturn rings and many other important phenomena corresponded to their prediction in the astronomical yearbooks. The water vapour in the air had its highest tension, and the humidity in the air was low.

In a word, that describes the actual situation well even if it is a little dated: It was a beautiful day in August of the year 1913.”

So goes the opening paragraph of a novel of over 1,700 pages, considered to be one of the most significant European novels of the twentieth century. Which novel is it? (Hint: the original is in German).

AMOS is celebrating National Science Week 2016 by bringing the creative into the scientific!

Landscape in Stormy Weather, Vincent van Gogh (1853 - 1890) Nuenen, June - August 1885, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

AMOS invites art submissions from Australian school students for the theme “Weather as a force”.

Whether the weather has been a positive or negative force or just a force to be reckoned with, if the weather has moved you in some way and you can draw, paint, sketch or take a photograph about it, send it to us for a chance to win $200 for yourself or your class and science gear to the value of $250 for your school.

AMOS ART COMPETITION 2016 Open to all Australian school students in the following two entry year level categories (only one entry per person/class): • Category 1 - Preschool to Year 6 Primary school • Category 2 - Secondary school (Years 7 to 10) Each winning entry will receive a cash prize of $200 Each winning entry’s school will receive books and/or science kits to the value of $250.00 .

Entries will be judged on: Creativity, scientific insight, interest, interpretation of theme

AMOS, we are fascinated by the weather and

AMOS

AustralianMeteorological & OceanographicSociety

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The judging panel will be headed by the weather loving meteorologist Dick Whittaker (Sky News Weather, The Weather Channel) and the water obsessed artist Martine Emdur.

Entries must be uploaded online by 5:00pm Sunday, 18 September 2016

FOR FURTHER ENTRY DETAILS visit: www.amos.org.au

Article

Art for change Melissa Lyne

Jörg Plickat, divided planet, Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi 2015. Image: Clyde Yee

In the midst of spring each year, the neighbourhoods of Sydney’s Eastern suburbs transform.

Sculpture by the Sea is now the largest annual sculpture exhibition in the world, drawing 500,000 visitors, from near and far. School groups, tourists, locals (and in recent years, even royalty) flock to the seaside for a glimpse of the exhibition open to the elements— rain, hail or shine.

Featuring works large and small, the pieces are carefully chosen from submitting artists across the globe and placed along the coastal walk from Bondi to Tamarama.

The 2015 Sculpture by the Sea winner was Jörg Plickat with his work Divided Planet. The steel work worthy of the $60,000 prize is described as a lament at the wasted energy of political leaders who fail to overcome their differences, rather than uniting to address urgent human and environmental catastrophes such as poverty and global warming.

Art and science have long been a natural association, often used as a way to communicate concepts, to raise awareness, to bring forth action.

This year’s AMOS conference hosted a talk by Guy Abrahams, the CEO and co-founder of CLIMARTE. He spoke of a particular example of art driving social, political and environmental change: a photograph of Rock

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Island Bend in Tasmania, 1979 by Peter Dombrovskis. The photo was used as part of the Save the Franklin Campaign.

The photograph (if you haven’t seen it, please Google it) became the photographer’s most iconic image. Used with the caption “Could you vote for a party that would destroy this?” the image drove the successful campaign to prevent the damming of the Franklin River in the lead-up to the 1983 Federal election.

As David Karoly wrote in The Conversation last year (https://theconversation.com/climate-science-islooking-to-art-to-create-change-41185): “Rock Island Bend showed the Australian public what was at risk: a transcendent place, a wild and mysterious landscape, the Nature of our unconscious. Even though this was a place almost no one would visit, it was nevertheless too special, too beautiful to be destroyed.”

AMOS proudly continues to foster the association of art and science, this year re-launching the AMOS School Art Competition. More information: http://www.amos.org. au/Main/Art_Competition.aspx (or see left for flyer).

More information on Climarte: https://climarte.org/ Sculpture by the Sea returns to Bondi, Sydney for its 20th year from 20 October until 6 November, 2016: http:// sculpturebythesea.com/

Obituary

Dr. Gary Meyers: a man of science and humanity 1941–2016

by Craig Macaulay

Vale Gary. Image: Meyers family.

When Dr. Gary Meyers arrived from California as a senior scientist at the brand new CSIRO Marine Laboratories on Hobart’s waterfront, his chosen field of science, oceanography, was still very much in its infancy in Australia.

The ocean currents around the Australian coast were clearly in focus, and how the currents shaped and influenced the supply of seafood and coastal marine operations had been at the core of early oceanographic studies for 50 years.

But the questions that were to dominate the working life of Dr. Meyers extended far beyond Australian shores into the tropical Pacific and Indian Oceans—for here were the answers, as yet unknown in the early 1980s, to understanding how the oceans, working in tandem with the atmosphere over long time scales, shaped the global climate.

As a physical oceanographer, going to sea in the 1980s in Australia was indeed an

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exciting time. There was a new home for Australian oceanography, a new purpose-built oceanographic vessel, the Franklin, a growing core of scientists drawn from all corners of Australia and the globe, and sufficient funding to go to sea and find the drivers of our climate system.

The oceans—Indian, Pacific and Southern Ocean—proved fertile and little explored territory to cast what today may seem unsophisticated instruments, and from which data could be drawn that could be modelled and interpretations made.

With colleagues at CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology, Dr. Meyers set about building an internationally relevant research presence in the Southern Hemisphere, while helping to generate a foundation capability for Australia in ocean research. He was a much-respected leader of scientists.

Obituary Dr Meyers died on April 19 after a long illness, leaving a scientific legacy that bolstered recognition of Australia as a critical contributor to the understanding of climate processes, a deep insight into constructing the necessary observation systems that would give and give for decades to come, and a dedication to science that would reward future students of the discipline of oceanography.

Most significant of all, beyond the science, was the recognition he attained from friends and colleagues around the world of a man with the strongest humanitarian values, always willing to consult and to entertain long philosophical discussions over a wine and on the widest of issues, “He obviously had a great love of the oceans and I think nature more broadly,” wrote a colleague, Dr. John Parslow, “and an intense interest in better understanding them. But I suspect he also had a genuine interest in the people around him, and a desire to understand them better.”

“Although he had much to be proud of, there was a humility in his dealings with others, perhaps based on an understanding of human frailty.”

In Dr. Meyers, and through his wisdom, humility and compassion, there was a clear demonstration of what the presence of newlyarrived CSIRO staff from many parts of Australia and elsewhere around the world, and those who followed, offered the Hobart community.

His journey to Tasmania, with wife Linda, was not direct but more as an educated drifter, eager to acquire knowledge of other places and peoples, not unlike one of his favoured authors, the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis.

From Berkeley, California, where he graduated in physics in 1965, Dr. Meyers set off as a wandering spirit to explore Europe and for seven years lived in Spain and France, becoming fluent in both languages, and then spent wo years working on a kibbutz in Israel. These were heady days in Europe, with the Vietnam War in the background. He worked at whatever jobs he could find, with science left to engage in at some future time.

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Inspired by Rachel Carson’s classic, The Sea Around Us, he returned to his studies in 1972, first at the University of Hawaii, then at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, completing his Ph.D. in 1978 under the supervision of Prof.

Klaus Wyrtki. Dr. Meyers and his family came to Australia in 1983 to join the CSIRO Division of Oceanography in Hobart, which, with CSIRO Division of Fisheries was a newlyformed community of scientists eager to begin painting the many gaps on a wide blue canvas. In Hobart, he was among chemists, taxonomists, biologists, engineers, administrators and ship managers.

One of his early and very significant hydrographic contributions was to develop, with U.S. collaborators and Australian colleagues at the Bureau of Meteorology, a global ocean-observing system deploying small torpedo-shaped instruments called expendable bathythermographs to measure the oceans’ subsurface salinity and temperature. To achieve this, he harnessed the regional fleet of merchant ships sailing from Australian ports east to New Zealand and the Pacific, west to Sri Lanka and the Middle East and North to Singapore through Indonesia.

This was sufficient to form maps of the ocean’s physical conditions, the conditions that generate the rainfall farmers across southern Australia were so reliant upon. In the future this would be used to predict the extent of rainfall likely from the Indian Ocean, and generate an understanding of links between the Indian Ocean, the El Niño Southern Oscillation and the series of ocean currents draining the Pacific into the Indian Ocean.

In the Pacific, he was a research leader in the Tropical Oceans-Global Atmosphere program, a 10-year study from 1985 to 1994, funded through the World Climate Research Program and aimed specifically at the prediction of climate phenomena on time scales of months to years. TOGA emphasised the tropical oceans and their relationship to the global atmosphere.

As Manager of CSIRO’s Oceans and Climate Program from 1997–2003 and in collaboration with the Bureau of Meteorology, he initiated development of the model (POAMA) to predict seasonal climate in Australia. A natural extension of this was the collaboration

Obituary between CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology and the Royal Australian Navy to construct the computer model BlueLink and provide maps of temperature and salinity in the oceanic structure around Australia, particularly for submarine defence. The Bureau now runs the models operationally to provide climate and marine services to the public.

It was a natural succession for Dr. Meyers to extend his Australian and international service in two key areas, first as Chairman of the World Climate Research Program’s CLIVAR-GOOS Indian Ocean Panel 2004–2008, and then from 2007–2009 as the inaugural Director of the Australian Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS). This facility today operates in tandem with universities, the Bureau of Meteorology, CSIRO and international research institutions developing deep ocean and coastal observation networks generating data in realtime for scientists at their desk. Here was a significant advance on the time when some moored instruments would take measurements over a 12-month period, before then being retrieved by ship for later analysis.

The current Director of IMOS, Mr. Tim Moltmann, described Dr. Meyers as the ideal person to lead IMOS in its establishment phase. “He was well-known and respected in the global ocean observing community, and brought an incredible wisdom and depth of experience to the job. He had the courage, intellect and passion required to turn a great concept into a fully functional, national ocean observing system.”

Dr. Meyers received the Morton Medal of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society in 2006 for leadership in oceanography, climate and related fields, through development of young scientists, and through the creation of a sophisticated research environment in Australia.

Retiring from CSIRO in 2007, Dr. Meyers continued to spend time at the CSIRO labs contributing his experience and knowledge to scientific papers and reviewing the work of colleagues and students, the latter being the people who could expand on the current

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understanding of the link between oceans, atmosphere and climate.

Indeed, there were few better people to take charge of the innovative Quantitative Marine Science program at the University of Tasmania, helping young scientists towards their Ph.D.s.

Colleague, Dr. Trevor McDougall, saw in Dr. Meyers a visionary who brought energy to ocean and climate science.

“He was the calm, patient, persistent, driving force behind not only Blue Link but also the repeat hydrography lines (both low and high resolution), IMOS and the QMS scheme; these are huge achievements.”

Dr. Harry Hendon, a Bureau of Meteorology colleague at the Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research, attributed much of what Dr. Meyers was able to achieve to his nonjudgmental and supportive nature.

“Besides being the rare oceanographer who knew as much about the atmosphere as most meteorologists, Gary always found value in everybody’s view and would always help extract the most relevant and important bits of a research project so as to get maximum benefit out of diverse and sometimes seemingly worthless endeavours. At least in the Australian community, he was unique.”

Dr. Meyers served on the Hobart committee of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society. Chair of the Society’s Tasmanian Regional Centre, Dr. Andrew Marshall wrote: “Gary was a role model, both as an inspirational science leader and as a gentle and compassionate man.”

“A half-hour meeting with Gary one day in 2004 as a visiting Melbournian motivated my decision to move to Hobart, he was warm and welcoming with open arms. ‘I look forward to seeing you here one day’ were his parting words. We have lost a friend, a mentor and a wonderful human being.”

Dr. Meyers is survived by his wife Linda, their daughters Rachel and Rebecca, and their families.

The Australian Climate and Water Exchange Research Initiative

Call for Applications

Australian Climate and Water Summer Institute We are soliciting student applications for a competitive fellowship grant to participate in the 2016 Australian Climate and Water Summer Institute. This prestigious event offers up to 14 of the best students in Australia a unique opportunity to work closely with peers and experts from academia and government agencies to enhance climate and water information and its practical applications.

Successful applicants will have affinity with climate and water issues but can be from any relevant technical background.

The Summer Institute is organised by a consortium of government and research organisations and will take place in Canberra from 5 December 2016 until 20 January 2017, with a Christmas break from 23 December 2016 – January 2.

Student research fellows will collaborate intensively in small teams for six weeks to work on projects developing an application or improvement to data services and analysis tools from the by Summer Institute partners. During the first 2 weeks of ‘boot camp’, students will obtain a deeper understanding of the role and workings of different government agencies, participate in the annual OzEWEX national workshop, and receive intensive training and mentoring to help them undertake their project in the following 4 weeks. The Summer Institute will focus on a small number of broad themes led by experts from the consortium partner organisations and academia.

Depending on their chosen project topic, students will be embedded with one of the partner organisations. At the culmination event, each team will present their results in a poster and short paper. Following the Summer Institute, teams will be assisted in further developing their project outcomes into a peer-reviewed publication.

Applications close 18 September 2016.

For more information or to apply, go to www.ozewex.org

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Expanded focus and new name, we’ve relaunched our journal The first and second issues of the Journal of

Southern Hemisphere Earth Systems Science (JSHESS) are now available at:

http://www.bom.gov.au/jshess/

With world-class research from across the southern hemisphere in meteorology, climatology, oceanography, hydrology and the land surface, the first issue includes articles on: •

Increased frequency of major flooding in coastal southeastern Australia

•

Improved atmospheric motion vectors using new satellite imagery

•

A new cloud detection algorithm from China

•

Evaluating regional climate models in Tanzania

•

Daily precipitation analysis in the Snowy Mountains

The current issue is a special issue, featuring the Eastern Seaboard Climate Change Initiative (ESCCI) East Coast Lows project.

Building on past success, this is an exciting evolution of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Journal (AMOJ).

The journal is published by the Bureau of Meteorology in association with the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society.

Read the first two issues now or submit your paper today. to: jshess@amos.org.au

The Research Corner with Damien Irving

Keeping up with Continuum I’m going to spend the next few paragraphs gushing over a for-profit company called Continuum Analytics. I know that seems a little weird for a column that devotes much of its content to open science, but stick with me. It turns out that if you want to keep up with the latest developments in data science, then you need to be on top of what this company is doing.

If you’ve heard of the company, it’s probably in relation to a widely used Python distribution called Anaconda. In a nutshell, Travis Oliphant (who was the primary creator of NumPy) and his team at Continuum developed Anaconda, gave it away for free to the world, and then built a thriving business around it. Continuum makes its money by

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providing training, consultation and support to paying customers who use Anaconda (and who are engaged in data science/analytics more generally), in much the same way that RedHat provides support to customers using Linux.

The great thing about companies like RedHat and Continuum is that because their business fundamentally depends on open source software, they contribute a great deal back to the open source community. If you’ve ever been to a SciPy conference (something I would highly recommend), you would have noticed that there’s always a few presentations from Continuum staff, whose primary job appears to be to simply work on the coolest

The Research Corner with Damien Irving open source projects going around. What’s more, the company seems to have a knack for supporting projects that make life much, much easier for regular data scientists (i.e. people who know how to analyse data in Python, but for which things like system administration and web programming are beyond them). For instance, the projects they support can help you install software without having to know anything about system administration (using a package called conda), create interactive web visualisations without knowing Javascript (bokeh), process data arrays larger than the available RAM without knowing anything about multi-core parallel processing (dask) and even speed up your code without having to resort to a low level language (numba).

Of these examples, the most important achievement (in my opinion) is the conda package manager. Once you’ve installed either Anaconda (which comes with 75 of the most popular Python data science libraries already installed) or Miniconda (which essentially just comes with conda and nothing else), you can then use conda to install pretty much any library you’d like with one simple command line entry. That’s right. If you want pandas, just type conda install pandas and it will be there, along with its dependencies, playing nicely with all your other libraries. If you decide you’d like to access pandas from the jupyter notebook, just type conda install jupyter and you’re done. There are about 330 libraries available directly like this and because they are maintained by the Continuum team, they are guaranteed to work.

While this is all really nice, other Python distributions like Canopy also come with a package manager for installing widely used libraries. What sets conda apart is the ease with which the wider community can contribute. If you’ve written a library that you’d like people to be able to install easily, you don’t have to wait until it hits the top 330 (or 75) on the data science charts. Instead, you can write your own conda installation package for that library and post it at anaconda.org (which is referred to as Anaconda Cloud). For instance, Andrew Dawson (a climate scientist at Oxford) has written eofs, a Python library for doing Empirical Orthogonal Function (EOF) analysis. Rather than have users of his software mess around installing the dependencies for eofs, he has posted a conda package at his channel on Anaconda Cloud. Just type, conda install -c https://conda. anaconda.org/ajdawson eofs

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and you’re done; it will install eofs and all its dependencies for you. Some Anaconda Cloud users (e.g. like the US Integrated Ocean Observing System) even go a step further and post packages for a wide variety of Python libraries that are relevant to the work they do. This vast archive of community contributed conda packages means there isn’t a single library I use in my daily work that isn’t available via either conda install or Anaconda Cloud. In fact, a problem I often face is that there is more than one installation package for a particular library (i.e. which one do I use? And if I get an error, where should I ask for assistance?). To solve this problem, a website called conda-forge has recently been launched. The idea is that it will house the lone instance of every community contributed package, in order to (a) avoid duplication of effort, and (b) make it clear where questions (and suggested updates / bug fixes) should be directed.

The final mind blowing feature of conda is the ease with which you can manage different environments.

Rather than lump all your Python libraries in together, it can be nice to have a clean and completely separate environment for each discrete aspect of the work you do (e.g. I have separate environments for my ocean data analysis, atmosphere data analysis and for testing new libraries). This will sound familiar to anyone who has used the virtual environments library in Python (virtualenv), but again the value of conda environments is the ease with which the community can share. As an example, I’ve shared the details of my ocean data analysis environment at Anaconda Cloud (right down to the precise version of every single Python library). It took only two command line entries to do this, and now anyone can come along and recreate that environment on their own computer by typing conda env create damienirving/ blog-example. This is obviously huge for the reproducibility of my work, so for my next paper I’ll be posting a corresponding conda environment to Anaconda Cloud.

If you want to know more about Continuum, I highly recommend this Talk Python To Me podcast with Travis Oliphant: https://talkpython.fm/episodes/ show/34/continuum-scientific-python-and-thebusiness-of-open-source A version of this article is available at https://drclimate. wordpress.com/, which provides links to further information about many of the topics discussed.

Charts from the Past with Blair Trewin

29 March, 1940 The summer and early autumn of 1939–40 was a very dry period through much of southeastern Australia. Victoria had its driest December-March period on record, whilst Sydney had both its driest summer (47.8 mm) and driest December-March (62.9 mm). There was a strong northsouth contrast in temperatures; it was a rather hot summer from New South Wales northwards (including a historic late-January heatwave in southeast Queensland which included Brisbane’s hottest day on record), but very cool further south, especially by night, with Tasmania having its coolest summer on record and Victoria its secondcoolest.

Conditions changed quickly at the start of March. At the end of summer, snow fell on the Alps and Melbourne had two of its coolest February nights of the 20th century.

A rapid warming then occurred at the start of March, peaking in a major heatwave from the 10th to the 13th which brought Melbourne its record March temperature (41.7 °C on the 11th).

Temperatures remained generally above average for the next fortnight, culminating in a further major heatwave in the last few days of March as high pressure became established over the east coast. In many areas, temperatures reached unprecedented levels for so late in the season.

Both Sydney (38.7 °C on the 28th) and Melbourne (37.8 °C on the 29th) set records—neither of which has yet been approached within a week­—for the latest date on which 100 °F (37.8 °C) has been reached. (A further indication of the event’s significance is that neither city has reached 35 °C in April). Readings in the high 30s were commonplace at lower elevations throughout southeastern Australia, although the inland was not much warmer than the coast; no Victorian site reached 40 °C, and the highest temperature of the event was 41.8 °C at Kyancutta in South Australia. In some places the event reached benchmark levels for any time in March; Richmond, west of Sydney,

reached 37.8 °C on five consecutive days from 27–31 March.

The hot and dry conditions, with strong winds in some places, resulted in extensive bushfires—something not unheard of at that time of year in Victoria and South Australia, but very rare in coastal New South Wales. A fire originating in the Blue Mountains burned 40,000 hectares and reached as far east as Mulgoa and Wallacia, while further outbreaks affected Rydal, Oberon, the Moss Vale area and Bulli—the old Berrima jail caught fire but was saved. Houses were lost in Victoria around Euroa and Mount Evelyn, whilst the Adelaide Hills and the Southeast of South Australia were also badly affected with heavy stock losses.

In northern Western Australia, a tropical cyclone tracking along the Kimberley coast turned south and made landfall south of Broome late on the 28th. La Grange (now Bidyadanga) observed a pressure of 972 hPa, although Broome itself suffered only minor damage and the pearling fleet reached shelter. Several sites had more than 100 mm of rain, with 196.9 mm on the 29th at Anna Plains. Moisture from this system eventually reached South Australia and western Victoria on the 31st.

A cool change reached Victoria on the 30th and extended to New South Wales the next day. The two major heatwaves, combined with above-average temperatures through the rest of the month, meant that March mean maximum temperatures were the highest on record over a vast area of southern Australia, including most of Victoria, the southern halves of South Australia and New South Wales, and parts of interior Western Australia, although nights were closer to normal. Canberra’s average maximum of 29.9 °C is nearly two degrees above that of any other March, whilst Melbourne (28.9 °C) set a record by more than a degree.

Synoptic chart for 0900 AEST, 29 March 1940 Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society Vol. 29 page 48

Calendar

2016

November

September 12–16 16th EMS Annual Meeting & 11th European Conference on Applied Climatology (ECAC), Trieste, Italy 18–25 CLIVAR Open Science Conference: Charting the course for climate and ocean research, Qingdao, China 20–22 1.5 degrees: meeting the challenges of the Paris Agreement, Oxford University, Oxford, England 26–29 2016 SPIE Remote Sensing Symposium, Edinburgh International Conference Centre, UK 26–29 FACEing the future: food production and ecosystems, Giessen, Germany

2–4 WCRP Model Hierarchies Workshop, Princeton University, New Jersey, USA 20–24 ARCCSS Annual Workshop, Lorne, Victoria

December 12–16 AGU Fall Meeting, San Francisco, USA

2017 January 22–26 2017 AMS Annual Meeting, Seattle, USA

October

February

21–23 DANTE: Dating the Anthropocene in Environmental archives—Bridging the gap between 210Pb and radiocarbon age dating, Toulouse, France

1–3 Symposium on Climate Change Adaptation in Asia, New Delhi, India

23–25 STATMOS Workshop on Climate and Weather Extremes, State College, Pennsylvania, USA 25–27 EGU Leonardo Topical Conference Series on the Hydrological Cycle. Ephyslab group, Ourense, Spain

7–10 AMOS National Conference 2017, Canberra, Australia 12–17 International Symposium on The Cryosphere in a Changing Climate, Wellington, New Zealand

Call for Associate Editors Do you enjoy talking to and corresponding with a wide range of atmospheric, oceanographic, land surface and earth system scientists? Do you have a keen interest in communicating science to a broader audience? Do you often read a science article and think to yourself “This could have been written / edited better”? Would you like to increase your understanding of the publishing process?

If you answered “Yes!” to any or all of these questions then you have the opportunity to engage in these activities as an Associate Editor for the Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (BAMOS).

The position: proactively seek out and encourage interesting speakers and/or scientists in the AMOS sciences to submit their work to BAMOS and then coordinate the publication process. Being an Associate Editor will give you first-hand experience of publishing, and will also allow you to take a more active role in supporting the AMOS community.

The position is voluntary and ongoing for as long as you wish to remain in the role. There is currently no specification for the number of applicants and anyone working in the AMOS-related subjects is encouraged to apply.

You will work closely with and report to the current Editor. Please contact Melissa at melissa@amos.org.au with an expression of interest if you’d like to undertake one of these positions that will contribute significantly to the development of BAMOS. We look forward to hearing from you!

Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society Vol. 29 page 49

BAMOS Author Guidelines

For all submissions: The Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (BAMOS) accepts short (<2500 words) contributions of original research work for peerreview and consideration in the “Science Articles” section.

Longer articles will be considered at the discretion of the Editor and Editor-in-Chief. Articles submitted to BAMOS should also be appropriate for the whole AMOS community (from weather enthusiasts to professional members) and should aim to be concise without using excessive scientific jargon.

For the peer-reviewed “Science Articles” section, authors should follow these guidelines: 1. Articles should be submitted as a PDF or Word document (or similar) for peer-review and include all figures and tables either within the main text or consecutively at the end of the article.

2. Articles should have a line spacing of 1.5 or more using a font size of 12. Articles should preferably be written using Times New Roman or Arial.

3. Articles should be split into sections, with the heading for each section numbered consecutively and using a font size of 14. For example (these are title examples, headings are made at the authors’ discretion):

1. Introduction

2. Method

3. Results

4. Conclusions

4. An abstract is required and should not be more than 150 words in length.

5. Acknowledgements to be included after the final work section and before the references.

6. References should follow these example formats: •

Journal Articles:

Jung, T., Ferranti, L. and Tompkins, A.M., 2006, Response to the summer of 2003 Mediterranean SST anomalies over Europe and Africa, Journal of Climate, 19, 5439–5454.

•

Books:

Holton, J.R., 2004, An Introduction to Dynamic Meteorology. Academic Press, New York. 535 pp.

•

Book chapter:

Raymond, D.J., 1993. Chapter 2: Observational constraints on cumulus parameterizations. In: The representation of cumulus convection in numerical models, Meteorological

Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society Vol. 29 page 50

Monographs, 24 (46), 17–28, American Meteorological Society, Boston, USA. •

Theses:

Trewin, B., 2001, Extreme temperature events in Australia.

PhD Thesis, School of Earth Sciences, University of Melbourne, Australia.

•

Web sites:

Department of Sustainability and Environment, 2012, Bushfire history - Major bushfires in Victoria, www.dse. vic.gov.au/fire-and-other-emergencies/major-bushfires-invictoria/ 7. We recommend that the author(s) make five suggestions for referees to undertake the peer-review.

Also, we ask for a list of five potential referees whom the author does not want as reviewers, due to conflicts of interest, or past close association..

8. Once peer-review has been completed, a final version of the document should be sent to the editor either in Word format or as plain text. The document should also include figure and table captions and the references but no figures. Figure files should be sent separately (they may be in any format and the editor will confer with the author(s) on the resolution and formatting).

9. Galley-proofs will be sent to the author(s) for final checking before publication.

BAMOS also accepts a wide range of non-peer-reviewed work, for example news items, charts from the past, conference reports, book reviews, biographical articles and meet a member. AMOS members are therefore encouraged to submit articles that would be of general interest to the AMOS community without necessarily requiring peer review. File formats should follow those given above; a word or plain text document should be submitted (which includes any figure captions and tables) along with any figure files given separately.

All articles should be either posted or emailed to the editor with any questions on the formatting also directed to the editor (see the inside back cover of this issue for contact details).

2016 AMOS Council Executive

Sub-Committee Convenors

Ordinary Members

Centre Chairs

President Mary Voice Vice-President Andrew Marshall Secretary Damien Irving Treasurer Angela Maharaj Past President Todd Lane

Adam Morgan Andy Pitman Jason Evans John McBride Robert Colman Roger Dargaville

AMOS Executive Officer Jeanette Dargaville GPO Box 1289, Melbourne VIC 3001 (attn: AMOS admin officer) E-mail: admin@amos.org.au

Expert Group Chairs

Public Relations Vacant Education & Outreach Vacant Equity & Diversity Ailie Gallant Awards Neville Nicholls 2017 Conference Clem Davis

ACT Jeff Kingwell Adelaide Darren Ray Brisbane Andrew Wiebe Darwin Ian Shepherd TAS Andrew Marshall Melbourne Andrew King NSW Anthony Kiem Perth Jatin Kala

Representatives

JSHESS David Karoly Science & Technology Australia Steven Phipps AMOS is represented on the relevant Australian Academy of Science committees.

Atmospheric & Oceanic Composition Robyn Schofield Climate Variability Jaci Brown Land Surface Processes Jason Evans Physical Oceanography Diana Greenslade Weather & Weather Prediction Michael Reeder

2016 Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society ISSN 1035-6576

Editor

Contributors

Editor-in-chief

Advertising Manager

Melissa Lyne Email: melissa@amos.org.au

Vacant

Associate Editor (oceanography)

Christopher Bull

Assistant Editors

Blair Trewin Damien Irving

Please contact the Executive Officer.

Publisher

AMOS, GPO Box 1289, Melbourne VIC 3001, Australia

Diana Greenslade, Blair Trewin and Linden Ashcroft Contributed articles, news, announcements and correspondence for the Bulletin should be sent to the editor no later than 01 October 2016. They will be reviewed and the galley proofs returned to the author if requested. An ASCII version of the text is required via e-mail or digital media to minimise typographic errors.

The Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society is produced and distributed with the assistance of CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research and the Bureau of Meteorology.

AMOS Website: www.amos.org.au

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