When competing risk assessments for northern beef and sugar, assessing the likelihood of extreme events occurring in the future is difficult. For nearly all of the thresholds used, there has been no analysis of the historical records in order to assess their climatological occurrence, so the likelihood of these events occurring was impossible to quantify accurately within a reasonable timeframe.
To assist with this kind of analysis, the development of a simple tool was requested. It would need capacity to handle multiple variables, different thresholds and different accumulation periods for stations throughout Australia.
An extreme weather event is not always characterised by one climate variable, such as temperature. In many cases, weather that is cold, wet and windy has a far greater impact than cold alone. Additionally, thresholds for what constitutes an extreme weather event can differ by location (for example, 38 °C for 3 days at Longreach will provide little heat stress risk, but may be more concerning at Charters Towers). Having one-fit-for-all thresholds do not suffice.
This tool is designed to review historical records and report instances of extreme weather events, where the threshold of what constitutes an extreme event can be customised by the user. Options include:
- Station (location)
- Temperature
- Precipitation
- Windspeed
- Number of consecutive days
Climate variables can be combined as necessary to investigate extreme events caused by more than one factor (for example, temperature below 5°C combined with windspeed above 5m/s).
For instructions on setting up the project for a development environment and building from source code, review CONTRIBUTING.md.
For instructions on installing and using the tool, review the tutorial.
Laura Guillory
Web Developer
Centre for Applied Climate Sciences
University of Southern Queensland
[email protected]