2019-20 Honours project - An analysis of the likelihood of meteorological conditions suitable for downburst thunderstorms over Tasmania using the BARRA reanalysis

This project will determine the downburst thunderstorms over Tasmania from the Severe Storms Archive, investigate the atmospheric condition during those downburst thunderstorms and determine the probability of meteorological conditions suitable for downburst thunderstorms over Tasmania during 1990-2019. This project will use the recently completed Bureau of Meteorology Atmospheric high-resolution Regional Reanalysis for Australia (BARRA) dataset, which offers more than 100 atmospheric model variables at higher resolution in space and time than existing global reanalyses (Jakob et al. 2017). The hourly temporal resolution, 70 levels vertical resolution and 1.5 km horizontal resolution, which has been developed specifically for Tasmania and other three regions, makes it particularly powerful in comparison to larger scale reanalyses for analysis of short-term phenomena like thunderstorms and their environments in Tasmania.