Why the weather experts have been getting it wrong
A new study out today outlines the risk Australians have been – and will continue to be – because weather experts are getting it wrong when predicting and preparing for extreme weather events.
The research stresses now is the time to assess major weather and climate catastrophes as a result of a combination of processes, not just caused by one hazard at a time.
In their paper published in Nature Climate Change, the scientists say a better understanding of the combination of factors contributing to a weather event may improve weather projections.
University of Adelaide lecturer in civil and environmental engineering, Dr Michael Leonard, said traditional planning and modelling looks at one weather event occurring on its own rather than multiple factors.
Pointing to the Brisbane floods of 2011, Dr Leonard said: “With the floods it was two storms in quick succession and there wasn’t enough appreciation for the quick succession of storms.
“The problem is we need to look at multiple extreme things happening together.
“There’s something that catches us off guard and as a professional community, we could do it better and try come up with these possible combinations to avoid getting caught out like that.
“It’s very easy to invent a doomsday scenario and dismiss it because it’s not practical, saying: ‘I can’t plan for that, then what’s the point?’ so people are reluctant.”
Dr Leonard said we could be better prepared for floods because computing power to test the variability of storms had come a long way.
“There’s really a need to revise our critical infrastructure and use computing power to come up with events that are possible to get a better idea of what can possibly go wrong,” he said.
“I think we do a bad job with that.
“People have not done as good a job of ‘what’s the chance of some of these things happening together?’”
The international paper was led by the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science in Switzerland with Australian researchers from the University of Adelaide and ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes with the University of New South Wales.
The paper recommend ways different players like climate scientists, engineers, social scientists, impact modellers and decision-makers can work better together to understand complex weather events.
“Usually when we experience these catastrophic failures it’s not one thing that’s gone wrong, it’s a whole sequence of things that have gone wrong and we need to guard against that,” Dr Leonard said.
“But there's also lots of practical challenges if we have multiple extremes happening together.
“When hazards impact communities we’ll hear, ‘the one that caught us by surprise’ and ‘we didn’t see it coming’ or ‘this wasn’t like the ones we’ve seen before’.
“We need to appreciate the variability in conditions we can experience and therefore avoid false complacency or false security — last time there was a fire it didn’t come near us, we got out with plenty of time — the next time there’s an alert it can diminish the implications of it.”