Nonlinear Processes in Geosciences

Why Bushfires raged out of control across Australia?

Davide Faranda January 22, 2020

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?

Davide Faranda November 27, 2019

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]

NP Interviews: the AGU 2019 Turcotte awardee Vera Melinda Galfi

Christian Franzke November 25, 2019

Credits: AGU

Before pursuing a scientific career, Melinda studied economics and worked in the field for several years. Her scientific career took place until now in Hamburg, Germany, where she completed both her undergraduate and graduate studies in meteorology. Melinda finished her PhD in 2018 under the supervision of Valerio Lucarini, studying extreme events in chaotic atmospheric models. She received the 20 ...[Read More]

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]