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: “Beyond univariate calibration: verifying spatial structure in ensembles of forecast fields”

Tommaso Alberti October 2, 2020

Example binary exceedance verification field and a subset of ensemble fields with representative FTE histogram for threshold τ=0 found using 5000 samples. Dark blue regions indicate threshold exceedance. All verification fields have correlation length a0=2 and ensemble fields have correlation length aM=1,2,3 in rows A, B, and C, respectively. FTE histograms are density histograms with dotted line y=1 and corresponding β-score (left) and β-bias (right) annotated. License: https://doi.org/10.5194/npg-27-411-2020.

The August 2020 NPG Paper of the Month award goes to Josh Jacobson and colleagues for their paper “Beyond univariate calibration: verifying spatial structure in ensembles of forecast fields” (https://doi.org/10.5194/npg-27-411-2020). The ability to know the future has long been sought after and coveted. Yet, in contrast to prophecies and crystal balls, modern methods of prediction are ...[Read More]