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]
NP Interviews: the 2021 Lewis Fry Richardson Medal Berengere Dubrulle
Today’s NP Interviews hosts the 2021 Lewis Fry Richardson Medal Berengere Dubrulle. Berengere is senior scientist at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and presently Director of the Les Houches Physics School. She received her PhD in astrophysics in 1990 under the supervision of J.-P. Zahn. She is a specialist of turbulence, and its application to astro and geophysical flows using th ...[Read More]
NPG Paper of the Month: “Empirical evidence of a fluctuation theorem for the wind mechanical power input into the ocean”
The pdf p(z,τ) (left) and the symmetry function normalised by the averaging time S(z,τ)/τ (right) as a function of the power input z for different averaging times τ (see caption). The variable τ gives the length of the averaging interval in terms of observations done every 6 hours. Data are for the recirculation area of the Atlantic subtropical gyre at a resolution of 0.5o in space and 6 hours in time for the period of 1993–2016. Note that the pdfs differ from Gaussian. The symmetry function converges to a straight line for increasing averaging periods, showing evidence of a FT.
License: “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]
From the eyes of tropical cyclones to flooded strands : how climatologists use weather events to make climate predictions?
Hurricane Florence seen from space: Credits: ESA/A.Gerst, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO.
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]