At the recent UNDERPIN2 conference (Understanding rare events and their climatic impacts, in Erice, Sicily), we held a discussion on the future of climate science. To guide the conversation, I ran an interactive survey to capture how climate scientists see the current challenges, opportunities, and blind spots in climate research, communication, and the use of artificial intelligence. The response ...[Read More]
From Theory to Impacts: Nonlinear Perspectives on Weather Extremes at UNDERPIN#2
From 1–5 August 2025, the medieval hilltop town of Erice, Sicily, hosted the second UNDERPIN workshop, a meeting organised within the Nonlinear Processes in Geosciences community and dedicated to advancing the science of weather extremes. The event brought together a truly diverse group of researchers, spanning climate dynamics, attribution science, socio-economic impacts, statistical physics, and ...[Read More]
AI-generated Images: the fragility of visual evidence in geosciences
Recently, an increased number of visually striking “scientific” images have been found online: snapshots of turbulent flows with dreamlike structure, eerily symmetric cloud patterns, and what appeared to be global temperature fields annotated with plausible colormaps and scientific-looking labels. Many of these posts quickly go viral on social media. And yet, in many cases, the images ...[Read More]
ECS SpotLight: Climate change on extreme winds already affects off-shore wind energy availability in Europe
Off-shore wind energy plays a key role in the transition to a renewable energy (RE) system, and its usage is expected to increase in the next few decades. Nevertheless, wind energy is one of the most variable and weather-dependent RE, because of its natural dependence on the wind speed, which can vary at different time scales, ranging from small-scale turbulence to seasonal oscillations and up to ...[Read More]