Iota, this is the name of the last category 5 hurricane in the Atlantic Ocean. Iota is a non-name because normally hurricanes are named by NOAA starting from A to Z but when the alphabet is over, they are just identified from a letter of the Greek alphabet. Iota is a special cyclone not just …[Read More]
The first days of October were marked by an extreme weather event: storm Alex, a cyclone of Atlantic origin, caused massive showers and thunderstorms over Provence, the Alps, Piedmont and Liguria. In these regions, numerous historical records of precipitation were broken causing the flooding of several streams and rivers in which many people lost their …[Read More]
Denver, Sept. 06: it is midday and Jonathan and Maria are sunbathing at City Park. They feel uncomfortable as the temperature has already reached 36°C. While they decide to go back home, their favoured weather app displays an unbelievable snowstorm watch for Tuesday Sept. 08. The forecast turns out to be rather accurate as all …[Read More]
This month the NPG Paper of the Month award is achieved by Jaqueline Lekscha and Reik Donner for their paper “Detecting dynamical anomalies in time series from different palaeoclimate proxy archives using windowed recurrence network analysis” (https://npg.copernicus.org/articles/27/261/2020/). Jaqueline Lekscha did her PhD in physics at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Humboldt University …[Read More]
In the last few years it has become a common practice to compensate carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by planting trees. This idea is simple and rooted on a very basic principle: trees get the energy of sunlight, and by photosynthesis they take water from the ground and CO2 from the air, releasing oxygen in the …[Read More]
While a previous blog entry dealt with the question whether we can use lessons from the nonlinear nature of climate for projections of the Covid-19 pandemic, there is now a first example of how the pandemic can teach us something on climate. The several weeks long lockdown of China made February 2020 an exceptional month …[Read More]
On February 9th, a British Airways Boeing 747 landed in London Heathrow airport just four hours and 56 minutes after its take-off in JFK, New York, setting the shortest flight-time for non-supersonic jets over this route. The jumbo jet took advantage of the fast upper-tropospheric winds associated with an exceptionally strong jet-stream which created tail …[Read More]
Australian wildfires have burned an impressively large surface and caused the death of at least 24 citizens as well as of numerous animals. This immense disaster raises questions about its linkage with climate change, the possibility of controlling these events and the future of Australian wildlife ecosystems. While the first question will be addressed by …[Read More]
A Mediterranean cyclone, high tides and climate change: these three ingredients made the 12/11/2019 acqua alta event in Venice exceptional. This combination of causes determined what climate scientists define as a compound extreme event, a non-linear mix of factors which led to several and connected extreme weather phenomena in the Mediterranean area. Let us start …[Read More]
Autumn is hurricane season in the north tropics and indeed 2019 does not make exception from this point of view. After Dorian hitting Bahamas and North Carolina, the American National Hurricane Center named Lorenzo a tropical depression originating near Capo Verde. On September 25th Lorenzo became a category 1 hurricane, according to the Saffir-Simpson scale. …[Read More]
