The APS Topical Group on the Physics of Climate (APS-GPC) is excited to launch a new virtual monthly seminar series on climate physics and variability. These seminars are aimed at introducing the broader physics community (and math, engineering, and other communities) to the fundamentals of climate science as well as cutting-edge research and open questions in this field. APS invites you to attend ...[Read More]
NPG Paper of the Month: “Inferring the instability of a dynamical system from the skill of data assimilation exercises”
Scatter plots of the largest Lyapunov exponent (left) and Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy (right) against the skill of DA measured as the RMSE of the analysis. The experiments are done with model configurations displaying fully developed chaos (main panels) and with weakly chaotic configurations (insets). In all cases a strong observational constraint is applied: we measure the entire state vector at each time step. The theoretical error upper bound are also displayed (red markers).
The NPG paper of the month was awarded to “Inferring the instability of a dynamical system from the skill of data assimilation exercises” by Yumeng Chen, Alberto Carrassi, and Valerio Lucarini. Geophysical systems are usually described by a set of dynamical equations that are often non-linear and chaotic (Ghil and Lucarini, 2020). Errors about the initial state can grow, shrink, or sta ...[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]
From the eyes of tropical cyclones to flooded strands : how climatologists use weather events to make climate predictions?
Hurricane Florence seen from space: Credits: ESA/A.Gerst, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO.
While extreme events are meteorological in nature, climatologists collect them to draw conclusions about the state of the present climate and to get clues how they possibly change in the future. Thus, climate and weather find common ground. If we consider an event alone, we are not studying the climate, we are in the field of meteorology, the goal of climatologists is therefore to put extreme even ...[Read More]