Tinula Kariyawasam

Scholarship Student

RMIT University

About

Using century-long, daily observations from 100-plus Australian weather stations, Tinula's project detects record-breaking events at each location, analyses their trends and drivers, and develops predictive models suited to non-stationary climates. It also tests how geography and El Niño/La Niña influence the timing and clustering of local records. 

This research aims to:

• Detect and quantify station-level absolute records across key variables using high-quality daily data.
• model trends and drivers with time-series, probabilistic and extreme-value methods; 
• Forecast the likelihood of future local records and sequences of extreme days; 
• Deliver an accessible online tool for communities, farmers, and decision-makers, with potential to validate and scale internationally. 

Outputs will provide robust, local evidence to inform adaptive policy, long-term risk reduction and resilience planning.