Dr Doug Richardson
Research Associate
- PhD, Climate Science, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
- BSc (Hons), Mathematics and Statistics, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
Science
Weather of the 21st Century
Dr Doug Richardson is a climate scientists with expertise in weather and climate variability and extremes that have societal impacts. In his current role as Senior Research Fellow at the ARC CoE for Weather of the 21st Century, Doug specialises in understanding the role of the weather and climate in driving risks and opportunities to renewable energy supply and demand.
Doug completed his PhD at in 2019 at Newcastle University in the UK, where he assessed the predictability of drought and the relationship between drought and large-scale weather patterns. In 2016, Doug collaborated with the UK Met Office to design an operational forecast tool that provides the national Flood Forecasting Centre with early warning of extreme rainfall events. Doug worked as a Research Fellow at CSIRO, Hobart between 2019 and 2022, and was part of the Australian Climate Service, a national, multi-agency climate resilience program. In January 2023, Doug joined the ARC CoE for Climate Extremes, before starting his latest position in January 2026.
E-mail
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Where are high-resolution climate simulations consistent in future fire risk? Science Faculty Research Grants, 2026.
Accelerating climate intelligence provision for risk assessment using machine learning and artificial intelligence (CI), National Intelligence Discovery Grants, 2026.
Risks of compound climate extremes and impacts on agriculture, trade and fire occurrence, Australia-Germany Joint Research Cooperation Scheme, 2023 - 2025.
Doug's main research focuses on climate extremes, particularly compound events. He is currently investigating the extent to which Australia's energy grid is exposed to widespread reductions in renewable energy resource, and the synoptic and large-scale drivers of these reductions. Doug is also interested in climate hazards such as drought and wildfire weather, and has expertise on how and why these hazards occur and co-occur for different regions globally. Other areas that Doug works in include climate prediction on subseasonal to decadal time scales, synoptic weather classification and trend analysis of climate hazards.