The first days of October were marked by an extreme weather event: storm Alex, a cyclone of Atlantic origin, caused massive showers and thunderstorms over Provence, the Alps, Piedmont and Liguria. In these regions, numerous historical records of precipitation were broken causing the flooding of several streams and rivers in which many people lost their lives. Economic damage was also significant a ...[Read More]
Climate change
Perspectives on Climate Science: from historical developments to research frontiers
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]
Is climate change making the weather more extreme?
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]
NPG Paper of the Month: “Correcting for model changes in statistical postprocessing – an approach based on response theory”
This month the NPG Paper of the Month award is achieved by Jonathan Deameyer and Stéphane Vannitsem for their paper “Correcting for model changes in statistical postprocessing – an approach based on response theory” (https://doi.org/10.5194/npg-27-307-2020). Jonathan did his PhD in statistical mechanics at the Université Libre de Bruxelles under the supervision of Pierre Gaspard and he is currentl ...[Read More]
NPG Paper of the Month: “Detecting dynamical anomalies in time series from different palaeoclimate proxy archives using windowed recurrence network analysis”
This month the NPG Paper of the Month award is achieved by Jaqueline Lekscha and Reik Donner for their paper “Detecting dynamical anomalies in time series from different palaeoclimate proxy archives using windowed recurrence network analysis” (https://npg.copernicus.org/articles/27/261/2020/). Jaqueline Lekscha did her PhD in physics at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Humbold ...[Read More]
Is planting trees a feasible large-scale solution to mitigate climate change?
In the last few years it has become a common practice to compensate carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by planting trees. This idea is simple and rooted on a very basic principle: trees get the energy of sunlight, and by photosynthesis they take water from the ground and CO2 from the air, releasing oxygen in the atmosphere. The CO2 is then stored in trees and surrounding soil. Tree planting efforts ar ...[Read More]
COVID-19-related drop in anthropogenic aerosol emissions in China and corresponding cloud and climate effects
While a previous blog entry dealt with the question whether we can use lessons from the nonlinear nature of climate for projections of the Covid-19 pandemic, there is now a first example of how the pandemic can teach us something on climate. The several weeks long lockdown of China made February 2020 an exceptional month in terms of air quality; aerosol emissions were tremendously reduced leading ...[Read More]
After Lorenzo and Ophelia, should we prepare European coasts for tropical storms and hurricanes?
Autumn is hurricane season in the north tropics and indeed 2019 does not make exception from this point of view. After Dorian hitting Bahamas and North Carolina, the American National Hurricane Center named Lorenzo a tropical depression originating near Capo Verde. On September 25th Lorenzo became a category 1 hurricane, according to the Saffir-Simpson scale. This scale categorizes the hurricanes ...[Read More]
June Heatwave 2019: can we attribute the event to anthropogenic emission?
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]