Jennifer Catto on rainfall decline
From On the front line: finding how much rain comes from fronts | Jennifer Catto · · Monash Education
“There is a general scientific consensus in Australia that the declining rainfall in Perth was due to a decline in the number of fronts passing over that region, but a colleague of mine had recently shown that actually the number of fronts in that region hadn't declined over the past 30 years.”
On , Jennifer Catto, Executive Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer at SABRE CORP, spoke about rainfall decline during On the front line: finding how much rain comes from fronts | Jennifer Catto on Monash Education.
About Jennifer Catto
Jennifer Catto, a researcher in atmospheric science, gave a talk in 2015 describing her work on weather fronts and their contribution to rainfall. She stated that in the mid-latitudes, 68% of rainfall comes from fronts, a figure she said had not been previously quantified globally. Catto also noted that rainfall from fronts is twice as heavy as non-frontal rainfall, and that her research involved using automated software to identify fronts in gridded observational data. Catto discussed the challenges of scientific publishing, including responding to reviewer criticism about methodology. She said that her work has been used to evaluate climate models, with the goal of understanding how rainfall patterns related to fronts may change in the future. She also mentioned a scientific consensus in Australia that declining rainfall in Perth was due to fewer fronts, but noted that a colleague had found no decline in the number of fronts over the past 30 years.