Undergraduate opportunities at UNSW
The ARC Centre of Excellence for the Weather of the 21st Century explores how Australia’s weather is being reshaped by climate change. We offer highly competitive scholarships intended to provide undergraduate students from Australian universities with an introduction to cutting-edge climate science and weather change research.
Students should be in their second, third, or post-honours year and interested in pursuing honours or a postgraduate degree in climate or weather change science. At UNSW, scholarship projects may either run on a full-time basis over the summer or other mid-semester/trimester breaks, or part-time for the equivalent of six weeks fulltime work throughout the academic year. The scholarships are valued at $3,800.
If you have any questions about our undergraduate research scholarships, please contact the Centre’s Associate Director Leadership and Training Melissa Hart.
There are no UNSW projects available within the Centre at this time. Please check back later for updates and new opportunities.
To apply for an undergraduate research project, please complete this form, which is also available at the bottom of the page.
How well can we simulate land surface processes across Australia?
Supervisors: Mat Lipson, Anna Ukkola
Many impacts of climate change are felt through land surface processes which also modulate the weather and climate processes around us. Land surface models that represent these processes are an integral part of climate models and inform us about many policy-relevant questions including future water resources, carbon uptake and ecosystem processes. The Australian climate research community currently uses two land surface models, CABLE and JULES.
This project will evaluate new high resolution simulations from the two models across Australia to understand their relative strengths and weaknesses in simulating Australia water, carbon and energy cycles. The specific focus can be tailored to suit the student’s interests but could include evaluating long-term hydrological processes (e.g. evaporation and runoff), carbon fluxes, urban processes or extremes such as drought. The project will contribute to a wider collaboration across several universities, the Bureau of Meteorology and ACCESS-NRI.
Requirements: Familiarity with scientific programming (R, Python or similar)
Algorithmic Performance Visualiser
Supervisors: Sam Green, Sanaa Hobeichi
Build a tool that benchmarks and visualises how common scientific array operations scale with dataset size and chunking (NumPy vs xarray eager vs xarray+Dask), producing interactive “scaling curves” and “chunking maps” that teach users how performance changes.
Requirements: A student who is comfortable writing Python, curious about performance, willing to run controlled experiments, and interested in understanding how scientific code behaves as data sizes grow.