About Us
Established in 2025
The need for a project like SHEP was discussed since 2023. Discussions were partly facilitated by the National Environmental Science Program (NESP) Climate Systems Hub and the National Partnership for Climate Projections (NPCP). Following this, a group of interested scientists continued working toward a coordinated, collaborative project to address the possible changes in sub-hourly extreme precipitation due to climate change.
In 2024 this group, led by Professor Jason Evans, formulated a project to do this over major Australian and New Zealand cities.
At the end of 2024 the Sub-Hourly Extreme Precipitation (SHEP) project proposal was officially endorsed by the Coordinated Regional climate Downscaling EXperiment (CORDEX), an element of the World Climate Research Program (WCRP), as a Flagship Pilot Study. At this time Dr Marcus Thatcher joined Jason as co-lead of SHEP.
Jason and Marcus
Mission
The SHEP mission is to provide reliable projections of future changes in sub-hourly extreme precipitation due to climate change, and provide this information so it is useful for climate change impact and adaptation work as well as informing water sensitive structure design.
Vision
The SHEP vision is to create kilometre-scale, multi-model ensemble of climate change projections for extreme sub-hourly precipitation events. To use these projections to understand the processes causing these changes, and to inform existing guidelines for water sensitive structure design about these changes.
Values
- Collaboration
- Scientific Excellence
- Societal impact