Today’s NP Interviews hosts the 2020 Lewis Fry Richardson Medal Valerio Lucarini. Valerio (b. Ancona, Italy, 1976) is the Director of the Centre for the Mathematics of Planet Earth and Professor of Statistical Mechanics at the University of Reading, and former Professor of Theoretical Meteorology at the University of Hamburg. His main expertise is in …[Read More]
On February 9th, a British Airways Boeing 747 landed in London Heathrow airport just four hours and 56 minutes after its take-off in JFK, New York, setting the shortest flight-time for non-supersonic jets over this route. The jumbo jet took advantage of the fast upper-tropospheric winds associated with an exceptionally strong jet-stream which created tail …[Read More]
Australian wildfires have burned an impressively large surface and caused the death of at least 24 citizens as well as of numerous animals. This immense disaster raises questions about its linkage with climate change, the possibility of controlling these events and the future of Australian wildlife ecosystems. While the first question will be addressed by …[Read More]
A Mediterranean cyclone, high tides and climate change: these three ingredients made the 12/11/2019 acqua alta event in Venice exceptional. This combination of causes determined what climate scientists define as a compound extreme event, a non-linear mix of factors which led to several and connected extreme weather phenomena in the Mediterranean area. Let us start …[Read More]
Autumn is hurricane season in the north tropics and indeed 2019 does not make exception from this point of view. After Dorian hitting Bahamas and North Carolina, the American National Hurricane Center named Lorenzo a tropical depression originating near Capo Verde. On September 25th Lorenzo became a category 1 hurricane, according to the Saffir-Simpson scale. …[Read More]
If August Rodin had lived nowadays, he would have placed his gates of hell (la Porte de l’Enfer) in Gallargues-le-Montueux, where the absolute French temperature record (45.9 °C) was set on June 28th this year. The last week of June has been very hot, not only in the south of France, but overall central Europe: …[Read More]
