Nonlinear Processes in Geosciences

NP Interviews: the 2019 Lewis Fry Richardson Medallist Shaun Lovejoy

Tommaso Alberti October 21, 2019

Shaun Lovejoy receiving the Lewis Fry Richardson Medal at EGU2019 from the NP Division President Stéphane Vannitsem. Credits: EGU/Foto Pfluegl

Today’s NP Interviews hosts the Lewis Fry Richardson Medallist Shaun Lovejoy. Shaun has degrees in physics from Cambridge and McGill University; he has been a McGill professor since 1985. For four decades, he has developed fractal, scaling ideas in the geosciences, contributing to advances in cascade processes, multifractals, anisotropic scale invariance, space-time multifractal modeling as well a ...[Read More]

After Lorenzo and Ophelia, should we prepare European coasts for tropical storms and hurricanes?

Davide Faranda October 15, 2019

probability forecasts of tropical storm force winds issued by the National Hurrican Center issued on 02/10/2019. Source: https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/graphics_at3.shtml?tswind120? .

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. This scale categorizes the hurricanes ...[Read More]

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

Davide Faranda September 9, 2019

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]

Workshop report: Mathematics of the Economy and Climate

Anna von der Heydt September 9, 2019

Percentage change in regional GDP under a laissez-faire scenario in 2100. Source: http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/pctgdp1.mp4 .

Just before the summer a group of about 40 scientists gathered in an old Monastery in the Netherlands (Kontakt der Kontinenten, Soesterberg) for a rather special collaborative workshop entitled “Mathematics of the economy and climate”. Mathematicians, climate scientists and economists – a group of scientists that normally does not mix and are rather unfamiliar with each other’s researc ...[Read More]