Historical weather observations only capture a small snapshot of the full possible range of climate variability. This means that the future could hold extreme climate events outside the range of anything in the past ~120 years even before we account for human-caused climate change. For example, it is very likely that natural climate variability in Australia could produce 'megadroughts' lasting 20 or more years - it is just luck that we have not experienced one of these in the past century. But these are the sort of events that we need to be prepared for.

On top of that, Earth's climate is changing, due to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Only by understanding both the full range of natural variability and how that is changing because of climate change can we properly quantify future climate risk. 

My research addresses both of these, with a particular focus on both the water cycle and the tropical Pacific. These are particularly tricky things to study, as climate models tend to have pretty strong biases in both - the result of which being that the 'natural variability' part is often neglected. Hence, we (I) must seek information elsewhere to validate whatever it is climate models tell us about likely future changes. I use information both from historical observations, and from natural archives of hydroclimate variability over past centuries - things like ice cores, tree rings, coral carbonates, lake sediments, and more. We call these 'palaeoclimate proxies'. 

My current research into Australian droughts is funded by a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award from the Australian Research Council (DE250100071), a L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women In Science fellowship, and the National Computational Infrastructure Merit Allocation Scheme. With the generous support of these schemes, I am:

• running idealised climate model simulations to assess the influence of Indian and Pacific Ocean sea surface temperature variability on global droughts
• producing and interpreting new tree-ring based records of hydroclimate change in the Australian Alps
• producing and interpreting new precipitation stable isotope data from Hobart
• developing novel numerical methods to combine this (and much more!) data for a holistic understanding of Australian climate and how it is changing

I also co-lead the major international collaboration 'Hydroclimate2k' - a PAGES 2k project that seeks to understand global water cycle variability over the Common Era (the past ~2000 years) and how that is changing with climate change.