Search results for "CLIMATE MODEL"
showing 10 items of 102 documents
The impact of climate change on extreme precipitation in Sicily, Italy
2018
Increasing precipitation extremes are one of the possible consequences of a warmer climate. These may exceed the capacity of urban drainage systems, and thus impact the urban environment. Because short-duration precipitation events are primarily responsible for flooding in urban systems, it is important to assess the response of extreme precipitation at hourly (or sub-hourly) scales to a warming climate. This study aims to evaluate the projected changes in extreme rainfall events across the region of Sicily (Italy) and, for two urban areas, to assess possible changes in Depth-Duration-Frequency (DDF) curves. We used Regional Climate Model outputs from Coordinated Regional Climate Downscalin…
Analysis of directional effects on atmospheric correction
2013
Abstract Atmospheric correction in the Visible and Near Infrared (VNIR) spectral range of remotely sensed data is significantly simplified if we assume a Lambertian target. However, natural surfaces are anisotropic. Therefore, this assumption will introduce an error in surface directional reflectance estimates and consequently in the estimation of vegetation indexes such as the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and the surface albedo retrieval. In this paper we evaluate the influence of directional effects on the atmospheric correction and its impact in the NDVI and albedo estimation. First, we derived the NDVI and surface albedo from data corrected assuming a Lambertian surface…
The 1430s: a cold period of extraordinary internal climate variability during the early Spörer Minimum with social and economic impacts in north-west…
2016
Changes in climate affected human societies throughout the last millennium. While European cold periods in the 17th and 18th century have been assessed in detail, earlier cold periods received much less attention due to sparse information available. New evidence from proxy archives, historical documentary sources and climate model simulations permit us to provide an interdisciplinary, systematic assessment of an exceptionally cold period in the 15th century. Our assessment includes the role of internal, unforced climate variability and external forcing in shaping extreme climatic conditions and the impacts on and responses of the medieval society in north-western and central Europe. Climate…
Inter-annual climate variability in Europe during the Oligocene icehouse
2017
Abstract New sclerochronological data suggest that a variability comparable to the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) was already present during the middle Oligocene, about 20 Myr earlier than formerly assumed. Annual increment width data of long-lived marine bivalves of Oligocene (30–25 Ma) strata from Central Europe revealed a distinct quasi-decadal climate variability modulated on 2–12 (mainly 3–7) year cycles. As in many other modern bivalves, these periodic changes in shell growth were most likely related to changes in primary productivity, which in turn, were coupled to atmospheric circulation patterns. Stable carbon isotope values of the shells (δ 13 C shell ) further corroborated the …
Climate indices for the Baltic states from principal component analysis
2017
Abstract. We used principal component analysis (PCA) to derive climate indices that describe the main spatial features of the climate in the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania). Monthly mean temperature and total precipitation values derived from the ensemble of bias-corrected regional climate models (RCMs) were used. Principal components were derived for the years 1961–1990. The first three components describe 92 % of the variance in the initial data and were chosen as climate indices in further analysis. Spatial patterns of these indices and their correlation with the initial variables were analyzed, and it was detected (based on correlation coefficient between principal compon…
Persistence of orographic mixed‐phase clouds
2016
Mixed-phase clouds (MPCs) consist of ice crystals and supercooled water droplets at temperatures between 0 and approximately −38°C. They are thermodynamically unstable because the saturation vapor pressure over ice is lower than that over supercooled liquid water. Nevertheless, long-lived MPCs are ubiquitous in the Arctic. Here we show that persistent MPCs are also frequently found in orographic terrain, especially in the Swiss Alps, when the updraft velocities are high enough to exceed saturation with respect to liquid water allowing simultaneous growth of supercooled liquid droplets and ice crystals. Their existence is characterized by holographic measurements of cloud particles obtained …
ERA5-Land: A state-of-the-art global reanalysis dataset for land applications
2021
Framed within the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) of the European Commission, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) is producing an enhanced global dataset for the land component of the fifth generation of European ReAnalysis (ERA5), hereafter referred to as ERA5-Land. Once completed, the period covered will span from 1950 to the present, with continuous updates to support land monitoring applications. ERA5-Land describes the evolution of the water and energy cycles over land in a consistent manner over the production period, which, among others, could be used to analyse trends and anomalies. This is achieved through global high-resolution numerical integrat…
An Estimate of Global, Regional and Seasonal Cirrus Cloud Radiative Effects Contributed by Homogeneous Ice Nucleation
2020
There are two fundamental mechanisms through which cirrus clouds form; homo- and heterogeneous ice nucleation (henceforth hom and het). The relative contribution of each mechanism to ice crystal production often determines the microphysical and radiative properties of a cirrus cloud. This study attempts to estimate the radiative contribution of hom relative to het by constraining the cloud microphysics in a climate model to conform with satellite retrievals of cirrus cloud effective diameter De, where the sampled cirrus cloud base had a temperature T Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation) satellite retrievals for cirrus clouds are compared against an updat…
The nature of ice-nucleating particles affects the radiative properties of tropical convective cloud systems
2020
Abstract. Convective cloud systems in the maritime tropics play a critical role in global climate, but accurately representing aerosol interactions within these clouds persists as a major challenge for weather and climate modelling. We quantify the effect of ice-nucleating particles (INP) on the radiative properties of a complex Tropical Atlantic deep convective cloud field using a regional model with an advanced double-moment microphysics scheme. Our results show that the domain-mean daylight outgoing radiation varies by up to 18 W m−2 depending on the bio- and physico-chemical properties of INP. The key distinction between different INPs is the temperature dependence of ice formation, whi…
Numerical evidence for thermohaline circulation reversals during the Maastrichtian
2005
[1] The sensitivity of the Maastrichtian thermohaline circulation to the opening/closing of marine communications between the Arctic and North Pacific oceans is investigated through a set of numerical experiments using the model CLIMBER-2 (Earth Model of Intermediate Complexity). We show here that the opening or closing of an Arctic-Pacific marine gateway induces transitions between different equilibrium states of the thermohaline circulation. Sensitivity tests of the inferred modes of thermohaline circulation to atmospheric CO2 level changes have also been explored. An abrupt switch in deep convection from high northern to high southern latitudes, a change consistent with isotopic evidence…