Persistent atmospheric circulation patterns are not a necessary requirement for warm temperature extremes in Europe. This key finding from a recent study led by Emma Holmberg challenges a more traditional meteorological view of persistence, which typically considers summertime heatwaves, especially in northern regions of Europe, to be synonymous with persistent atmospheric flow patterns. Furthermo ...[Read More]
Exploring the multistable and multiscale climate system via noise
Could our present day “warm” climate turn into a frozen fully glaciated one, as if the whole Earth is a huge “snowball”? That was a question put forward independently by Mikhail Budyko and William Sellers in the late 60s [1,2] who made a first estimate of the necessary changes of incoming solar radiation, such that either the Arctic ice sheet completely melts, or the planet gets fully frozen. Base ...[Read More]
NPG Paper of the Month: “Empirical evidence of a fluctuation theorem for the wind mechanical power input into the ocean”

This month the NPG Paper of the Month award is achieved by Achim Wirth for his paper “Empirical evidence of a fluctuation theorem for the wind mechanical power input into the ocean“. Achim obtained his PhD at the University of Nice (Franc), doing research on turbulence theory. He then moved to oceanography working at UCLA (USA) and Geomar (Germany). Since 2005 he holds a permanent position a ...[Read More]
NPG Paper of the Month: “Ordering of trajectories reveals hierarchical finite-time coherent sets in Lagrangian particle data: detecting Agulhas rings in the South Atlantic Ocean”

The February 2021 NPG Paper of the Month award goes David Wichmann and his co-authors for their paper “Ordering of trajectories reveals hierarchical finite-time coherent sets in Lagrangian particle data: detecting Agulhas rings in the South Atlantic Ocean“. Understanding the transport of tracers and particulates is an important topic in oceanography and in fluid dynamics in general. Th ...[Read More]