Nonlinear Processes in Geosciences

The never-ending 2020 hurricane season

Davide Faranda November 23, 2020

Hurricane Iota approaching central America: satellite picture. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Iota, this is the name of the last category 5 hurricane in the Atlantic Ocean. Iota is a non-name because normally hurricanes are named by NOAA starting from A to Z but when the alphabet is over, they are just identified from a letter of the Greek alphabet. Iota is a special cyclone not just because its name implies that the hurricane season is particularly rich in storms but also because of its e ...[Read More]

Can we connect the exceptional floods in France and Italy associated with the storm Alex to climate change?

Davide Faranda October 14, 2020

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]

Perspectives on Climate Science: from historical developments to research frontiers

Tommaso Alberti October 5, 2020

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]

NPG Paper of the Month “Anthropocene climate bifurcation”

Tommaso Alberti September 24, 2020

Arctic surface temperature change projected to year 2300 (relative to year 2000 mean temperature of -28.90 °C), with linearly increasing ocean heat transport F_O . (a) With constant F_A = 104 W/m2, there is a jump in temperature for RCP 8.5 but not for the other choices of RCP. (b) The same as (a) except that in addition to increasing F_O , the atmosphere heat transport F_A also increases linearly from 104 to 129 W/m2 . Now upward transitions occur on both RCP 8.5 and 6.0, as indicated by the arrows. License: https://doi.org/10.5194/npg-27-391-2020.

The July 2020 NPG Paper of the Month award goes to Kolja Kypke, William Langford and Allan Willms, for their paper “Anthropocene climate bifurcation” (https://doi.org/10.5194/npg-27-391-2020). All three authors work at the University of Guelph, in Guelph, Ontario, Canada. William Langford did his PhD at the California Institute of Technology in 1971 under the supervision of Herbert Kel ...[Read More]