Heat extremes have grown disproportionately since the advent of industrialization and are expected to intensify further under unabated greenhouse warming, spreading unevenly across the globe. However, amplification mechanisms are highly uncertain because of the complex interplay between regional physical responses to human forcing and the statistical properties of atmospheric temperatures. Here, focusing on the latter, we explain how and to what extent the leading moments of thermal distributions sway the future trajectories of heat extremes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPhilos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci
December 2021
There is evidence that variable and synchronous reproduction in seed plants (masting) correlates to modes of climate variability, e.g. El Niño Southern Oscillation and North Atlantic Oscillation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn climate model simulations of future climate change, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is projected to decline. However, the impacts of this decline, relative to other changes, remain to be identified. Here we address this problem by analyzing 30 idealized abrupt-4xCO climate model simulations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe finite resolution of general circulation models of the coupled atmosphere-ocean system and the effects of sub-grid-scale variability present a major source of uncertainty in model simulations on all time scales. The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts has been at the forefront of developing new approaches to account for these uncertainties. In particular, the stochastically perturbed physical tendency scheme and the stochastically perturbed backscatter algorithm for the atmosphere are now used routinely for global numerical weather prediction.
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