Nonlinear Processes in Geosciences

When carbon emissions break nature: icebergs and their feedback to climate change

Davide Faranda May 21, 2021

This image distributed by the European Space Agency (ESA) on May 20, 2021 shows a view of the A-76 iceberg off the Ronne sea ice in the Weddell Sea, Antarctica. It was captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission. Credits: ESA.

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 statement released Wednesday, May 20, by the European Space Agency. Several studies are ...[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”

David Wichmann March 16, 2021

Result of the OPTICS algorithm applied to the trajectories modelled in the Bickley Jet model flow. (a), (d) and (g) show the reachability plot with different DBSCAN clustering results, indicated by the black horizontal line. The corresponding clustering results of each choice of DBSCAN parameter is shown on the right of the reachability plots for different times. Grey particles correspond to noise. Axis units in the centre and right column are in 1000 km.

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]

NP Campfire: “Perspectives on Climate Science: from historical developments to research frontiers”

Tommaso Alberti January 19, 2021

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 thanks to a group of young and established s ...[Read More]

The never-ending 2020 hurricane season

Davide Faranda November 23, 2020

Hurricane Iota approaching central America: satellite picture. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

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 because its name implies that the hurricane season is particularly rich in storms but also because of its e ...[Read More]