NP
Nonlinear Processes in Geosciences

Multiscale dynamics

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

September 7, 2022
What the 2022 summer thunderstorms in the Mediterranean tell us about the ongoing climate change?

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”

and August 30, 2022
NP Interviews: Davide Faranda (CNRS) on the topic “global warming and extreme events in Europe”

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

June 17, 2022
A few reasons making the June 2022 French Heatwave too hot & too soon

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

May 26, 2022
ClimarisQ: A game on the complexity of the climate systems and the extreme events

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”

April 25, 2022
NPG Paper of the Month: “Inferring the instability of a dynamical system from the skill of data assimilation exercises”

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?

February 25, 2022
When weather extremes meet climate change: how do scientists attribute single events to climate change?

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]

NP Campfire: “Scaling and multifractals : from historical perspectives to recent developments”

, and December 20, 2021
NP Campfire: “Scaling and multifractals : from historical perspectives to recent developments”

Scaling law behaviours are ubiquitous in geosciences both from a theoretical and practical point of view. They are required to better understand, analyse and simulate the underlying processes, which yields the observed variability of geophysical fields over wide ranges of spatio-temporal scales. A group of scientists within the Nonlinear Processes in Geosciences (NP) Division of the European Geosc ...[Read More]

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

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]

Exploring the multistable and multiscale climate system via noise

December 7, 2021

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]

NPG Paper of the Month: “Empirical evidence of a fluctuation theorem for the wind mechanical power input into the ocean”

November 4, 2021
NPG Paper of the Month: “Empirical evidence of a fluctuation theorem for the wind mechanical power input into the ocean”

This month the NPG Paper of the Month award is achieved by Achim Wirth for his paper “Empirical evidence of a fluctuation theorem for the wind mechanical power input into the ocean“. Achim obtained his PhD at the University of Nice (Franc), doing research on turbulence theory. He then moved to oceanography working at UCLA (USA) and Geomar (Germany). Since 2005 he holds a permanent position a ...[Read More]