Nonlinear Processes in Geosciences

What the 2022 summer thunderstorms in the Mediterranean tell us about the ongoing climate change?

Davide Faranda September 7, 2022

The 2022 European summer was governed by the presence of a persistent cold drop (low pressure area) located between Portugal and France. The change in its position has determined the alternation between hot conditions (low pressure center over Portugal) and stormy conditions (cold drop over France). The warming of the Mediterranean Sea (up to +6°C compared to the period 1990-2020) has largely cont ...[Read More]

NP Interviews: Davide Faranda (CNRS) on the topic “global warming and extreme events in Europe”

Tommaso Alberti and Davide Faranda August 30, 2022

Davide Faranda is a physicist at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). His main interests are devoted to the construction of a statistical mechanical and dynamical systems framework for the study of atmospheric motions. In particular, his works aim at the characterization of the metastable states of the atmospheric circulation with simple mathematical and statistical tools, an ...[Read More]

A few reasons making the June 2022 French Heatwave too hot & too soon

Davide Faranda June 17, 2022

Too hot, Too soon: the thermometer has reached unprecedented temperature for a month of June in France, with the 40°C mark crossed by Friday June 17 in part of France. The IPCC AR6 report now clearly states that the probability of heatwave events such as this one has increased by a factor 3 to 5 in the present climate with respect to a counterfactual world not affected by anthropogenic greenhouse ...[Read More]

ClimarisQ: A game on the complexity of the climate systems and the extreme events

Davide Faranda May 26, 2022

ClimarisQ is a smartphone/web game from a scientific mediation project that highlights the complexity of the climate system and the urgency of collective action to limit climate change. It is available in four languages: English, French, Spanish and Italian. It is an app-game where players must make decisions to limit the frequency and impacts of extreme climate events and their impacts on human s ...[Read More]

NPG Paper of the Month: “Inferring the instability of a dynamical system from the skill of data assimilation exercises”

Yumeng Chen April 25, 2022

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]

When weather extremes meet climate change: how do scientists attribute single events to climate change?

Davide Faranda February 25, 2022

One of the main new points of the IPCC reports AR6 with respect to the previous ones is the increased confidence that global climate change induced by anthropogenic emissions is critically affecting the dynamics of weather extremes. For summer, and specifically over Europe, the AR6 report states that we are already observing prolonged periods of extremely warm conditions with increased droughts bo ...[Read More]

NPG Paper of the Month: “Comparing estimation techniques for temporal scaling in palaeoclimate time series”

Raphaël Hébert December 14, 2021

The NPG paper of the month of July was awarded to Comparing estimation techniques for temporal scaling in palaeoclimate time series by Raphaël Hébert, Kira Rehfeld and Thomas Laepple (https://doi.org/10.5194/npg-28-311-2021). Raphaël Hébert is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Alfred-Wegener-Institut in Potsdam (Germany) in the Earth System Diagnostics group of Thomas Laepple, where he a ...[Read More]

From the eyes of tropical cyclones to flooded strands : how climatologists use weather events to make climate predictions?

Davide Faranda October 26, 2021

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]

The 2021 Nobel Prize on Physics awarded to the physics of complex systems!

Valerio Lembo October 25, 2021

On October 7th, the Nobel Prize in Physics 2021 was announced. It came as a stunning surprise for the Non-linear Processes and Climate communities, the recipients of this year’s award being two outstanding senior climate scientists, Klaus Hasselmann and Syukuro Manabe, and a theoretical physicist specialized in complex systems, Giorgio Parisi. For many, this award was welcomed as a long-awaited re ...[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”

Tommaso Alberti January 29, 2021

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 report. Lower levels of dissolved oxy ...[Read More]