Lisa Alexander is a Professor in the Climate Change Research Centre at UNSW and a Chief Investigator on the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes.
Professor Alexander’s research has concentrated on understanding the variability and driving mechanisms of climate extremes. Her primary work aims to improve our understanding of observed changes in these events using multiple research tools ranging from station observations to climate model output. Much of her work has been focused on the creation of high quality global datasets and their comparison with state of the art climate models. Of particular significance is Professor Alexander’s work on the production and assessment of global datasets of temperature and rainfall extremes under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO) Expert Team on Climate Change Detection and Indices (ETCCDI) and more recently the Expert Team on Climate Information for Decisionmaking (ET-CID). She has led regional capacity building and development workshops on behalf of WMO in numerous developing countries which has included developing the climpact software to calculate and analyse climate extremes. Climpact is widely used by National Hydrological and Meteorological Services as well as other climate researchers around the world. Professor Alexander also sits on the Joint Scientific Committee of the World Climate Research Program.