Extreme weather conference in New Zealand

Voxy (New Zealand): Over the past decade, predicting the weather, and understanding the changes in climate, has emerged as one of the most important and topical areas of scientific endeavour. An international community of over 200 scientists will converge on Te Papa in Wellington this week for the Extreme Weather Conference, from 9 -11 February. The scientists will share information, and work to better understand extreme weather events such as recent damaging storms in New Zealand, and Cyclone Yasi, which hit northern Queensland last week with destructive winds reaching 290 kilometres per hour.

Cyclone Yasi demonstrated the importance of forecasting, and how, when combined with good preparation, this can dramatically reduce the impact of a cyclone….Conference presentations will cover six key areas:

• extreme weather in the Australasian region - from floods to droughts
• impact and meteorology of the main climate drivers (ENSO e.g. El Nio and La Nia,)
• using high-resolution models to understand local meteorology
• oceanography of the Australasian region
• climate change in the Australasian region
• impacts of natural catastrophes in the Australasian region.

Cyclone Yasi damage in Townsville, shot by Rob and Stephanie Levy, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license