Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Projects
Australian Research Council Linkage projects are collaborative projects between higher education researchers and other parts of the national innovation system, which are undertaken to acquire new knowledge, and which involve risk or innovation.
The Bureau will engage in an ARC linkage projects where the R&D is deemed to make a significant contribution to Bureau specific functions and has a solid scientific and technological basis. The Bureau is currently engaged in a number of ARC linkage projects with a climate and/or water focus, which will contribute new knowledge to support the Bureau's climate and water related activities.
Current projects
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- Narrowing the scatter and assessing the uncertainty of climate change projections of Australian river flows.
- The aims of this project are to reduce the range of uncertainty about future river flows, by pre-screening global climate models (GCMs) at the catchment scale and removing poorly performing GCMs from later analysis. Confidence intervals around future annual river flows will be estimated through hydrologic modelling of stochastic replicates of climate change projections. New methods to stochastically replicate non-stationary time series will be developed in this project. These confidence intervals represent a significant, although partial (stochastic only), quantification of the total range of uncertainty about future river flows.
- A new paradigm for catchment management: detection, forecasting and management of water catchments with multiple steady states.
- Hydrology models used in managing our catchments typically assume no feedbacks exist between the water cycle and vegetation, leading to simple catchment behaviour. New theoretical work shows that including feedbacks can lead to complex behaviour, including multiple steady states, with sudden switches between the states. This project will test these theories using monitoring data; predict which catchments exhibit complex behaviour; and develop management strategies to enhance catchment resilience. It will deliver new theories and tools to quantify the resilience of catchments, detect shifts between steady states and map groundwater elevation and estimate its trend.
- Dissecting two centuries of drought variability across southern Australia: An integrated palaeoecological-climate modelling approach.
- This project will use climate records from corals, tree-rings, and speleothems (cave formations) to test the skill of several climate models to reconstruct two centuries of drought variability across southern Australia and critically evaluate the conditions that generated the most extreme droughts of the 20th Century.
