On October 23 2022, a tornado outbreak occurred in France, causing extensive damages. Tornadoes in France are a relatively rare phenomenon, even more so in the second half of October. This weather phenomenon is linked to intense thunderstorms, and it is difficult to predict because it is very localized. Will global warming make this weather more frequent or intense? A thundercloud that grows visib ...[Read More]
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]
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]
The APS Topical Group on the Physics of Climate (APS-GPC) is excited to launch a new virtual monthly seminar series on climate physics and variability. These seminars are aimed at introducing the broader physics community (and math, engineering, and other communities) to the fundamentals of climate science as well as cutting-edge research and open questions in this field. APS invites you to attend ...[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]
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]
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]
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]
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]
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]