This year, like in the last few years, we are experiencing the effects of global heating in increasingly personal ways. The summer of 2022 exposed us to ever more extreme heat waves in North America, Europe, and Asia. For instance, the heat wave in India and Pakistan reached temperatures of 49C in Nawabshah, Pakistan. North America too experienced devastating heat waves and wildfires. Los Angeles ...[Read More]
Extratropical cyclones play a key role in modulating the precipitation and wind in mid-latitudes and can be responsible for extreme wet and windy events. With global warming, the dynamics and thermodynamics associated with these atmospheric systems are being affected. However, due to the complexity of modelling the climate system, a challenge arises when evaluating the influence that climate chang ...[Read More]
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]
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]
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 one of the reasons why climate change i ...[Read More]
Denver, Sept. 06: it is midday and Jonathan and Maria are sunbathing at City Park. They feel uncomfortable as the temperature has already reached 36°C. While they decide to go back home, their favoured weather app displays an unbelievable snowstorm watch for Tuesday Sept. 08. The forecast turns out to be rather accurate as all Colorado experiences one of the earliest snowstorms on record in Septem ...[Read More]
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 Climate Dynamics, Extreme Events, Statist ...[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: in the Alps, some locations such as Chamonix (France) and Aosta (Italy) experienced tem ...[Read More]