NP
Nonlinear Processes in Geosciences

Global Warming

The 2020 extra-tropical monster cyclones and their (possible) relations with climate change

February 18, 2020
The 2020 extra-tropical monster cyclones and their (possible) relations with climate change
The satellite image shows storm Uta (name chosen by the Freie University in Berlin) an incredibly large vortex spiraling close to Iceland.

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 winds of about 400km/h. Over the United Ki ...[Read More]

Why Bushfires raged out of control across Australia?

January 22, 2020
Why Bushfires raged out of control across Australia?
A diagram showing how pyrocumulonimbus clouds are formed. Credits: Bureau of Meteorology, Victoria.

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 soon to come attribution studies, and the ...[Read More]

Medicanes, thunderstorms and Acqua Alta in Venice: what is the role of climate change?

November 27, 2019
Medicanes, thunderstorms and Acqua Alta in Venice: what is the role of climate change?
The image shows a schematic representation of the extreme events associated to the medicane Detlef/Bernardo. The basic images is the infrared image from the EUMETSAT satellite network.

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 by the analysis of the atmospheri ...[Read More]

Abrupt Warming could bring our planet a “Hothouse Earth” with catastrophic consequences for our economy and society

September 9, 2019
Abrupt Warming could bring our planet a “Hothouse Earth” with catastrophic consequences for our economy and society
Global map of potential tipping cascades. The individual tipping elements are color-coded according to estimated thresholds in global average surface temperature (Source: W. Steffen et al., Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115 (33), 8252-8259, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1810141115, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1810141115 . License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .

Most of us have enjoyed swings in childhood. Some have even tried to swing faster and make a full 360 degrees’ loop. Those who succeeded had a very strange feeling of not being able to predict whether, increasing the energy of the swing, the transition from normal oscillations and 360 loops would happen. Indeed, there is an energy threshold such that the swing goes from oscillations to full loops ...[Read More]