Nonlinear Processes in Geosciences

NPG Paper of the Month: “Ordering of trajectories reveals hierarchical finite-time coherent sets in Lagrangian particle data: detecting Agulhas rings in the South Atlantic Ocean”

David Wichmann March 16, 2021

The February 2021 NPG Paper of the Month award goes David Wichmann and his co-authors for their paper “Ordering of trajectories reveals hierarchical finite-time coherent sets in Lagrangian particle data: detecting Agulhas rings in the South Atlantic Ocean“. Understanding the transport of tracers and particulates is an important topic in oceanography and in fluid dynamics in general. Th ...[Read More]

NPG Paper of the Month: “A methodology to obtain model-error covariances due to the discretization scheme from the parametric Kalman filter perspective”

Tommaso Alberti March 11, 2021

The January 2021 NPG Paper of the Month award goes to Olivier Pannekoucke and his co-authors for the paper “A methodology to obtain model-error covariances due to the discretization scheme from the parametric Kalman filter perspective“. In geophysics, forecasting is based on solving the equations of physics with the help of a computer. To calculate a forecast we need an initial conditi ...[Read More]

Four reasons for still observing cold spells despite the undeniable global climate change

Davide Faranda February 18, 2021

The winter of 2020-2021 has been characterized by various cold waves affecting – at different times – Western and Eastern Europe and North America. The most striking pictures show Madrid covered by up to 40 cm of fresh snow, frozen Thames near London and Canal St Martin in Paris, heavy snow in Amsterdam and even on the Eolian Islands, just offshore Sicily. At first this seems contradi ...[Read More]

The most-read NPG 2020 paper: “Effects of upwelling duration and phytoplankton growth regime on dissolved-oxygen levels in an idealized Iberian Peninsula upwelling system”

Tommaso Alberti January 29, 2021

An emerging problem brought by climate change is the on-going deoxygenation of the world’s oceans. The fact that concentrations of dissolved oxygen have been/are declining in both open-ocean and coastal waters is becoming a major scientific and societal concern raised in the Kiel Declaration and in the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) 2019 report. Lower levels of dissolved oxy ...[Read More]

NP Campfire: “Perspectives on Climate Science: from historical developments to research frontiers”

Tommaso Alberti January 19, 2021

Recently, the European Geosciences Union (EGU) started to support a new type of event called ‘Campfires’ that will give the Divisions the freedom to run online interactive events in a way that suits their needs. This allows the EGU Divisions to encourage interactions in their research communities through virtual informal meetings. In this framework, and thanks to a group of young and established s ...[Read More]

NPG Paper of the Month: “Statistical postprocessing of ensemble forecasts for  severe weather at Deutscher Wetterdienst”

Tommaso Alberti December 23, 2020

The October 2020 NPG Paper of the Month award goes to Reinhold Hess for the paper “Statistical postprocessing of ensemble forecasts for  severe weather at Deutscher Wetterdienst“. Ensemble Forecasting rose with the understanding of the limited predictability of weather. In a perfect ensemble system, the obtained ensemble of forecasts expresses the distribution of possible weather scena ...[Read More]

NPG Paper of the Month: “Applications of matrix factorization methods to climate data”

Tommaso Alberti December 7, 2020

The September 2020 NPG Paper of the Month award goes to Dylan Harries and Terence J. O’Kane for their paper “Applications of matrix factorization methods to climate data” (https://doi.org/10.5194/npg-27-453-2020). Dylan is a postdoctoral fellow within the Oceans and Atmosphere business unit of CSIRO (Australia). His current research focuses on methods for learning reduced-order models from d ...[Read More]

The never-ending 2020 hurricane season

Davide Faranda November 23, 2020

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]