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Abstract:
The recent flooding in Queensland and NSW has affirmed the impacts that extreme precipitation has on peoples lives and their livelihood. To be better prepared for such extremes in the future we need to know how often and under which climatic circumstances they occur. However, climate models for Australia still involve high uncertainty in predicting precipitation extremes. This is attributed to the limited paleo record of magnitude and frequency of past extremes. Though efforts have been made to improve the terrestrial record of hydro-climatic paleo data in Australia, there still exists a gap in scientific knowledge, especially on the spatial scale. Our project tackles this challenge by utilising paleoenvironmental evidence collected from various ephemeral lakes across the country. Since filling events of ephemeral lakes are strongly linked to precipitation events the terrestrial record from lakes in key quadrants of the country allows the establishment of timing, magnitude, variability, and trend of precipitation extremes in the past. A timeframe of the last thousand years permits the comparison of frequency and magnitude to inter-annual variability. While previous studies have focused on high resolution at specific locations the large spatial scale of this project enables the analysis of spatial variability and thus will result in an improved understanding of the importance of varying climatic drivers in different regions across Australia. Ultimately, by comparing the importance of climatic drivers for precipitation extremes in different regions against global climate simulations uncertainty can be reduced and future predictions of precipitation extremes can be improved.
