@article {bnh-3284, title = {Natural hazards in Australia: droughts}, journal = {Climatic Change}, volume = {139}, year = {2016}, month = {11/2016}, pages = {37-54}, chapter = {37}, abstract = {

Droughts are a recurrent and natural part of the Australian hydroclimate, with evidence of drought dating back thousands of years. However, our ability to monitor, attribute, forecast and manage drought is exposed as insufficient whenever a drought occurs. This paper summarises what is known about drought hazard, as opposed to the impacts of drought, in Australia and finds that, unlike other hydroclimatic hazards, we currently have very limited ability to tell when a drought will begin or end. Understanding, defining, monitoring, forecasting and managing drought is also complex due to the variety of temporal and spatial scales at which drought occurs and the diverse direct and indirect causes and consequences of drought. We argue that to improve understanding and management of drought, three key research challenges should be targeted: (1) defining and monitoring drought characteristics (i.e. frequency, start, duration, magnitude, and spatial extent) to remove confusion between drought causes, impacts and risks and better distinguish between drought, aridity, and water scarcity due to over-extractions; (2) documenting historical (instrumental and pre-instrumental) variation in drought to better understand baseline drought characteristics, enable more rigorous identification and attribution of drought events or trends, inform/evaluate hydrological and climate modelling activities and give insights into possible future drought scenarios; (3) improving the prediction and projection of drought characteristics with seasonal to multidecadal lead times and including more realistic modelling of the multiple factors that cause (or contribute to) drought so that the impacts of natural variability and anthropogenic climate change are accounted for and the reliability of long-term drought projections increases.

}, doi = {10.1007/s10584-016-1798-7}, url = {http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-016-1798-7}, author = {Anthony S. Kiem and Fiona Johnson and Seth Westra and Albert van Dijk and Jason P. Evans and O{\textquoteright}Donnell, Alison J. and Alexandra Rouillard and Cameron Barr and Johnathon Tyler and Mark Thyer and Doerte Jakob and Fitsum Woldemeskel and Bellie Sivakumar and Raj Mehrotra} } @article {bnh-3283, title = {Natural hazards in Australia: floods}, journal = {Climatic Change}, volume = {139}, year = {2016}, month = {11/2016}, pages = {21-35}, chapter = {21}, abstract = {

Floods are caused by a number of interacting factors, making it remarkably difficult to explain changes in flood hazard. This paper reviews the current understanding of historical trends and variability in flood hazard across Australia. Links between flood and rainfall trends cannot be made due to the influence of climate processes over a number of spatial and temporal scales as well as landscape changes that affect the catchment response. There are also still considerable uncertainties in future rainfall projections, particularly for sub-daily extreme rainfall events. This is in addition to the inherent uncertainty in hydrological modelling such as antecedent conditions and feedback mechanisms.

Research questions are posed based on the current state of knowledge. These include a need for high-resolution climate modelling studies and efforts in compiling and analysing databases of sub-daily rainfall and flood records. Finally there is a need to develop modelling frameworks that can deal with the interaction between climate processes at different spatio-temporal scales, so that historical flood trends can be better explained and future flood behaviour understood.

}, doi = {10.1007/s10584-016-1689-y}, url = {http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-016-1689-y}, author = {Fiona Johnson and Christopher J. White and Albert van Dijk and Marie Ekstrom and Jason P. Evans and Doerte Jakob and Anthony S. Kiem and M. Leonard and Alexandra Rouillard and Seth Westra} }