Related papers: How to cope with climate's complexity
Biological populations are subject to fluctuating environmental conditions. Different adaptive strategies can allow them to cope with these fluctuations: specialization to one particular environmental condition, adoption of a generalist…
An intriguing problem in climate science is the existence of Earth's glacial cycles. We show that it is possible to generate these periodic changes in climate by means of the Earth's carbon cycle as the main determinant factor. The carbon…
It is commonly accepted that the variations of Earth's orbit and obliquity control the timing of Pleistocene glacial-interglacial cycles. Evidence comes from power spectrum analysis of palaeoclimate records and from inspection of the timing…
Any experiment with climate models relies on a potentially large set of spatio-temporal boundary conditions. These can represent both the initial state of the system and/or forcings driving the model output throughout the experiment. Whilst…
Atmospheric flows exhibit long-range spatiotemporal correlations manifested as the fractal geometry to the global cloud cover pattern concomitant with inverse power law form for power spectra of temporal fluctuations on all space-time…
In ecology, climate and other fields, (sub)systems have been identified that can transition into a qualitatively different state when a critical threshold or tipping point in a driving process is crossed. An understanding of those tipping…
A comprehensive understanding of the behaviours of the various geophysical processes and an effective evaluation of time series (else referred to as "stochastic") simulation models require, among others, detailed investigations across…
Climate models play a crucial role in understanding the effect of environmental and man-made changes on climate to help mitigate climate risks and inform governmental decisions. Large global climate models such as the Community Earth System…
Processes in ocean physics, air-sea interaction and ocean biogeochemistry span enormous ranges in spatial and temporal scales, that is, from molecular to planetary and from seconds to millennia. Identifying and implementing sustainable…
Tropical cyclone (TC) intensity forecasts are issued by human forecasters who evaluate spatio-temporal observations (e.g., satellite imagery) and model output (e.g., numerical weather prediction, statistical models) to produce forecasts…
Climate models robustly imply that some significant change in precipitation patterns will occur. Models consistently project that the intensity of individual precipitation events increases by approximately 6-7%/K, following the increase in…
The Earth, like other planets with a relatively thick atmosphere, is not locally in radiative equilibrium and the transport of energy by the geophysical fluids (atmosphere and ocean) plays a fundamental role in determining its climate.…
Living systems operate far from equilibrium, yet few general frameworks provide global bounds on biological transients. In high-dimensional biological networks like ecosystems, long transients arise from the separate timescales of…
Earth's climate can be understood as a dynamical system that changes due to external forcing and internal couplings. Essential climate variables, such as surface air temperature, describe this dynamics. Our current interglacial, the…
Global Climate Models (GCMs) provide forecasts of future climate warming using a wide variety of highly sophisticated anthropogenic CO2 emissions models as input, each based on the evolution of four emissions "drivers": population p,…
A major goal in paleoclimate science is to reconstruct historical climates using proxies for climate variables such as those observed in sediment cores, and in the process learn about climate dynamics. This is hampered by uncertainties in…
The world is changing at an ever-increasing pace. And it has changed in a much more fundamental way than one would think, primarily because it has become more connected and interdependent than in our entire history. Every new product, every…
Klaus Hasselmann's revolutionary intuition in climate science was to take advantage of the stochasticity associated with fast weather processes to probe the slow dynamics of the climate system. This has led to fundamentally new ways to…
There is evidence that ice age cycles are paced by astronomical forcing, suggesting some kind of synchronisation phenomenon. Here, we identify the type of such synchronisation and explore systematically its uniqueness and robustness using a…
Using optimal detection techniques with climate model simulations, most of the observed increase of near surface temperatures over the second half of the twentieth century is attributed to anthropogenic influences. However, the partitioning…