As a drought takes hold, what is the best plan for Australia's farms?

“The sky, a great flaming oven. Grass withered; water gone; famine-stricken, blear-eyed bullocks, staggering pathetically ... Skeletons and bones everywhere.”

Bill Hannah in one of the four empty dams on his property
in Gundy, in the Hunter region of NSW. Much of Australia is
 - yet again - in the grip of drought.

So reads a tale of the terrible drought that scorched western Queensland in June 1902.  Earlier that year, Sydneysiders held a day of “humility and prayer” amid mounting concerns about the city’s water supplies. Victoria and Queensland would soon follow suit as the Federation Drought tightened its grip, according to Joelle Gergis’ new book, Sunburnt Country: The History And Future Of Climate Change In Australia.

The wheat crop that year was “all but lost”, sheep numbers halved and cattle would drop by 40 per cent by the end of the drought, which lasted from 1895 to 1902, Gergis writes.

Read story from The Age by Jessica Irvine and Peter Hannam - “As a drought takes hold, what is the best plan for Australia's farms?”

Using data science to understand global climate systems

Climate scientists at the University of Rochester are using data science to understand what drives the global climate system—from deep in the ocean to high in the sky.

Tom Weber uses data from NASA satellite images,
 such as the image above. The color of the surface
 ocean reflects how much phytoplankton biomass
 there is, with the greener color indicating more
 chlorophyll and therefore more phytoplankton. 

Xiaoxuan Wang ’18, a computer science major, is working with earth and environmental sciences professor Tom Weber on a project that combines data science and environmental science to look at the daily concentration of chlorophyll—and therefore phytoplankton—in the Great Lakes from 2002 to 2016.

The project mirrors Weber’s work on ocean carbon cycles by using NASA satellite data. Freshwater and seawater reflect light differently, and generally algorithms to sort this data have been designed for ocean waters. However, Weber and Wang are working with new satellite data from the Great Lakes, which is, Weber says, “the first attempt to visualize plankton growths in the Great Lakes from space.”

Wang uses a computer application called MATLAB to process and organize the large satellite data sets.

Read the Science and Technology Research News story - “Using data science to understand global climate systems.”