Assessing the impact of climate change on extreme fire weather events over southeastern Australia

Abstract

Extreme fire weather events in southeastern Australia are frequently associated with strong cold fronts moving through the area. A recent study has shown that the 850 hPa temperature and the magnitude of its gradient over a small region of southeastern Australia provide a simple means of discriminating the most extreme cold frontal events during the last 40 yr from reanalysis data sets. Applying this technique to 10 general circulation models (GCMs) from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project and calibrating the temperature gradient and temperature climatology of each model's simulation of the climate of the 20th century against the reanalysis climates allows estimates of likely changes i..