Past Projects

Severe Weather Research Projects

  • RELAMPAGO field project
  • Roames Weather
  • Coastal Convective Interations Experiment (CCIE)
  • Storm Hazards Testbed
  • Honours Thesis: To quantitatively explore the atmospheric properties of a primary thunderstorm track in SEQ and apply these results to aid in the validation and tuning of an operational forecast model (ACCESS). A pre-storm sounding database was collected from a regional thunderstorm hotspot identified by the TITAS project, with results showing the strong spatial variability to the BoM sounding station. A radar derived SBF analysis identified the process which supports the locality of thunderstorm hotspots in SEQ due to the influence of topography and dirunal flows. A modelling study of a unusally severe thunderstorm supported the evidence that air-mass boundaries (from diurnal flows) are important control in thunderstorm gensis and propagation for SEQ. (CRG and BoM) download
  • TITAS - Thunderstorm Identification, Tracking, Archiving and Searching. This program generates a radar derived climatology and enables a user to search through this data and select specific thunderstorms using search criteria. (Undergrad paper and BoM)
  • Dual Doppler Wind Fields. Inputs 2 doppler wind field images for different radars and calculates the resultant 2D wind field. Application to multiple supercells on the 16/11/08 over northern SEQ. (Undergrad paper and BoM)
  • Warm Air advection analysis of the May 2009 SEQ East Coast Low. This project applies 'Potential Vorticity Thinking' and 'Turning of winds with height thermal diagnostic' to explore tropospheric and stratospheric processes which lead the formation of this extreme rainfall even (Minor honours paper and BoM)
  • Tropical Cyclone Larry Vortex Rossby Wave Analysis A program designed to apply wavelet analysis to a sequence of tropical cyclone radar images and calculate the spatial distribution of wave patterns and various other cyclone parameters (BoM)
  • Double and Single 2D Holland models of a Cyclone. Allows a user to interpolate an estimated wind field using both the single and double Holland methods. (BoM)
  • Structural and dynamic analysis of the September 2009 SEQ dust storms using ceilometer data collected from the University of Queensland St Lucia campus (CRG)


Climate/Software Research Projects

  • Snowy Mountains Catchment Inflow Modeling. A state-space model to forecast snowy inflows based on previous pacific-decadal-oscillation values. Applied to simulate previous conditions using historical pdo records (Snowy Hydro and CRG)
  • Recontruction of histotric Snowy Mountains dam inflow using paleo PDO and sediment core records (Snowy Hydro and CRG)
  • Investigation of ENSO/IPO forcing in the climate variability from Lake Pupuke Maar, Auckland, New Zealand through spectral analsis methods (University of Auckland and CRG)
  • Reciever system and decoding software for the Vaisala RS-80 radiosondes (CRG)
  • Control software for the Tamya TD-3 Optical Balloon Theodolite (CRG)
  • Visualisation interface and boundary layer identification software for ceilometer data from the Vaisala Cl31 (CRG)
  • Spectral analysis of climate proxy data from peat cores from Stradebroke Island (CRG)
  • Investigation of CO2 forcing for reef environments around Heron Island, Queensland (CRG)