The largest iceberg in the world, named A-76, about 170 km long and 25 km wide, is drifting away from the Ronne pack ice in Antarctica. A76, originally spotted by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), a British polar research organization with a base nearby, will wander and melt in the Weddell Sea, according to a …[Read More]
Climate
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 …[Read More]
Four reasons for still observing cold spells despite the undeniable global climate change
The winter of 2020-2021 has been characterized by various cold waves affecting – at different times – Western and Eastern Europe and North America. The most striking pictures show Madrid covered by up to 40 cm of fresh snow, frozen Thames near London and Canal St Martin in Paris, heavy snow in Amsterdam and even …[Read More]
The most-read NPG 2020 paper: “Effects of upwelling duration and phytoplankton growth regime on dissolved-oxygen levels in an idealized Iberian Peninsula upwelling system”
An emerging problem brought by climate change is the on-going deoxygenation of the world’s oceans. The fact that concentrations of dissolved oxygen have been/are declining in both open-ocean and coastal waters is becoming a major scientific and societal concern raised in the Kiel Declaration and in the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) 2019 …[Read More]
NP Campfire: “Perspectives on Climate Science: from historical developments to research frontiers”
Recently, the European Geosciences Union (EGU) started to support a new type of event called ‘Campfires’ that will give the Divisions the freedom to run online interactive events in a way that suits their needs. This allows the EGU Divisions to encourage interactions in their research communities through virtual informal meetings. In this framework, and …[Read More]
NPG Paper of the Month: “Statistical postprocessing of ensemble forecasts for severe weather at Deutscher Wetterdienst”
The October 2020 NPG Paper of the Month award goes to Reinhold Hess for the paper “Statistical postprocessing of ensemble forecasts for severe weather at Deutscher Wetterdienst“. Ensemble Forecasting rose with the understanding of the limited predictability of weather. In a perfect ensemble system, the obtained ensemble of forecasts expresses the distribution of possible weather …[Read More]
The never-ending 2020 hurricane season
Iota, this is the name of the last category 5 hurricane in the Atlantic Ocean. Iota is a non-name because normally hurricanes are named by NOAA starting from A to Z but when the alphabet is over, they are just identified from a letter of the Greek alphabet. Iota is a special cyclone not just …[Read More]
Can we connect the exceptional floods in France and Italy associated with the storm Alex to climate change?
The first days of October were marked by an extreme weather event: storm Alex, a cyclone of Atlantic origin, caused massive showers and thunderstorms over Provence, the Alps, Piedmont and Liguria. In these regions, numerous historical records of precipitation were broken causing the flooding of several streams and rivers in which many people lost their …[Read More]
Perspectives on Climate Science: from historical developments to research frontiers
Breaking news: a bizarre early-September snowstorm dumped snow from Montana to New Mexico, a medicane hit Southern Italian regions and Greece, heatwaves and droughts are expected to increase in the future… These extreme events are becoming more and more frequent and one question spontaneously arises: is climate change making the weather more extreme? This is …[Read More]
NPG Paper of the Month “Anthropocene climate bifurcation”
The July 2020 NPG Paper of the Month award goes to Kolja Kypke, William Langford and Allan Willms, for their paper “Anthropocene climate bifurcation” (https://doi.org/10.5194/npg-27-391-2020). All three authors work at the University of Guelph, in Guelph, Ontario, Canada. William Langford did his PhD at the California Institute of Technology in 1971 under the supervision of …[Read More]