NP
Nonlinear Processes in Geosciences

Nonlinear Processes in Geosciences

Where is climate science heading? Views from the community

October 15, 2025
Where is climate science heading? Views from the community
Picture Credit: Andrea Schettino, Pexels

At the recent UNDERPIN2 conference (Understanding rare events and their climatic impacts, in Erice, Sicily), we held a discussion on the future of climate science. To guide the conversation, I ran an interactive survey to capture how climate scientists see the current challenges, opportunities, and blind spots in climate research, communication, and the use of artificial intelligence. The response ...[Read More]

From Theory to Impacts: Nonlinear Perspectives on Weather Extremes at UNDERPIN#2

August 29, 2025
From Theory to Impacts: Nonlinear Perspectives on Weather Extremes at UNDERPIN#2

From 1–5 August 2025, the medieval hilltop town of Erice, Sicily, hosted the second UNDERPIN workshop, a meeting organised within the Nonlinear Processes in Geosciences community and dedicated to advancing the science of weather extremes. The event brought together a truly diverse group of researchers, spanning climate dynamics, attribution science, socio-economic impacts, statistical physics, and ...[Read More]

AI-generated Images: the fragility of visual evidence in geosciences

and July 9, 2025
AI-generated Images: the fragility of visual evidence in geosciences
Figure: (left) Infrared satellite imagery of Hurricane Katrina. (right) AI-generated fake satellite image of a tropical cyclone over France. While visually similar to infrared satellite imagery, the storm structure and location are physically implausible and not based on real atmospheric data.

Recently, an increased number of visually striking “scientific” images have been found online: snapshots of turbulent flows with dreamlike structure, eerily symmetric cloud patterns, and what appeared to be global temperature fields annotated with plausible colormaps and scientific-looking labels. Many of these posts quickly go viral on social media. And yet, in many cases, the images ...[Read More]

EGU NP Paper of the Month “Finite-size local dimension as a tool for extracting geometrical properties of attractors of dynamical systems”

June 19, 2025
EGU NP Paper of the Month “Finite-size local dimension as a tool for extracting geometrical properties of attractors of dynamical systems”

The original goal of this study was to understand how the local dimension of the attractor of a dynamical system could be used to estimate the predictability of the future state of the system, and apply this in the case of radar images of rain. The local dimension using Extreme Value Theory (EVT) has been introduced and used in Faranda et al. (2017) to infer the current predictability of different ...[Read More]