aus-droughts-last-millennium

Scripts for analysing multi-year drought metrics in Australia in last millennium models.

Questions?? Contact nicky.wright@sydney.edu.au and/or georgina.falster@anu.edu.au

Citation

Falster, G. M., Wright, N. M., Abram, N. J., Ukkola, A. M., and Henley, B. J., 2024, Potential for historically unprecedented Australian droughts from natural variability and climate change, Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 28, 1383–1401, https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-28-1383-2024.

Files contained in this repository:

• climate_xr_funcs.py: some helpful functions for reading in climate models
• climate_droughts_xr_funcs.py: some functions specifically related to calculating the drought metrics
• analysis/drought_frequencies-processing.py: main script to process all files from PMIP3 and CESM-LME models:
  • Subsets all data up to 2000
  • Calculates precipitation anomalies, relative to specified climatology period (i.e. 1900-2000 mean)
  • Calculates drought metrics (length, intensity, severity, frequency) using definitions in climate_droughts_xr_funcs.py.
    • '2S2E': a drought starts after two years of negative precipitation anomalies, and ends after two years of positive precipitation anomalies (used within the paper)
    • below a threshold in general (e.g. 20%, median) of climatology
  • Saves file per model as netcdf
• Scripts for figures 1 to 10
• Murray-Darling Basin (MDB) shapefile