Highlight articles

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This page features highlight articles from EGU's open access journals Climate of the Past, Earth System Dynamics, Geoscientific Model Development and Weather and Climate Dynamics. These articles of particular interest are selected by journal editors.

204 items found

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The Making of the New European Wind Atlas – Part 2: Production and evaluation

This is the second of two papers that document the creation of the New European Wind Atlas (NEWA). The paper includes a detailed description of the technical and practical aspects that went into running the mesoscale simulations and the microscale downscaling for generating the climatology. A comprehensive evaluation of each component of the NEWA model chain is presented using observations from a large set of tall masts located all over Europe.

Climate change as an incentive for future human migration

We examine the implications of future motivation for humans to migrate by analyzing today’s relationships between climatic factors and population density, with all other factors held constant. Such analyses are unlikely to make accurate predictions but can still be useful for informing discussions about the broad range of incentives that might influence migration decisions. Areas with the highest projected population growth rates tend to be the areas most adversely affected by climate change.

Impact of horizontal resolution on global ocean–sea ice model simulationsbased on the experimental protocols of the Ocean Model IntercomparisonProject phase 2 (OMIP-2)

This paper presents global comparisons of fundamental global climate variables from a suite of four pairs of matched low- and high-resolution ocean and sea ice simulations to assess the robustness of climate-relevant improvements in ocean simulations associated with moving from coarse (∼1°) to eddy-resolving (∼0.1°) horizontal resolutions. Despite significant improvements, greatly enhanced horizontal resolution does not deliver unambiguous bias reduction in all regions for all models.

An improved mechanistic model for ammonia volatilization in Earth system models: Flow of Agricultural Nitrogen version 2 (FANv2)

Mostly emitted by the agricultural sector, ammonia has an important role in atmospheric chemistry. We developed a model to simulate how ammonia emissions respond to changes in temperature and soil moisture, and we evaluated agricultural ammonia emissions globally. The simulated emissions agree with earlier estimates over many regions, but the results highlight the variability of ammonia emissions and suggest that emissions in warm climates may be higher than previously thought.

The making of the New European Wind Atlas – Part 1: Model sensitivity

Wind energy resource assessment routinely uses numerical weather prediction model output. We describe the evaluation procedures used for picking the suitable blend of model setup and parameterizations for simulating European wind climatology with the WRF model. We assess the simulated winds against tall mast measurements using a suite of metrics, including the Earth Mover’s Distance, which diagnoses the performance of each ensemble member using the full wind speed and direction distribution.

A Bayesian framework for emergent constraints: case studies of climate sensitivity with PMIP

Interest in past climates as sources of information for the climate system has grown in recent years. In particular, studies of the warm mid-Pliocene and cold Last Glacial Maximum showed relationships between the tropical surface temperature of the Earth and its sensitivity to an abrupt doubling of atmospheric CO ₂ . In this study, we develop a new and promising statistical method and obtain similar results as previously observed, wherein the sensitivity does not seem to exceed extreme values.

Predicting the morphology of ice particles in deep convection using the super-droplet method:development and evaluation of SCALE-SDM 0.2.5-2.2.0, -2.2.1, and -2.2.2

Using the super-droplet method, we constructed a detailed numerical model of mixed-phase clouds based on kinetic description and subsequently demonstrated that a large-eddy simulation of a cumulonimbus which predicts ice particle morphology without assuming ice categories or mass–dimension relationships is possible. Our results strongly support the particle-based modeling methodology’s efficacy for simulating mixed-phase clouds.

HyLands 1.0: a hybrid landscape evolution model to simulate the impact of landslides and landslide-derived sediment on landscape evolution

Landslides shape the Earth’s surface and are a dominant source of terrestrial sediment. Rivers, then, act as conveyor belts evacuating landslide-produced sediment. Understanding the interaction among rivers and landslides is important to predict the Earth’s surface response to past and future environmental changes and for mitigating natural hazards. We develop HyLands, a new numerical model that provides a toolbox to explore how landslides and rivers interact over several timescales.

Lessons from a high-CO2 world: an ocean view from ∼3 million years ago

We examine the sea-surface temperature response to an interval of climate ~ 3.2 million years ago, when CO ₂ concentrations were similar to today and the near future. Our geological data and climate models show that global mean sea-surface temperatures were 2.3 to 3.2 ºC warmer than pre-industrial climate, that the mid-latitudes and high latitudes warmed more than the tropics, and that the warming was particularly enhanced in the North Atlantic Ocean.

Groundwater storage dynamics in the world’s large aquifer systems fromGRACE: uncertainty and role of extreme precipitation

Recent assessments of the sustainability of global groundwater resources using the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites assume that the underlying trends are linear. Here, we assess recent changes in groundwater storage (ΔGWS) in the world’s large aquifer systems using an ensemble of GRACE datasets and show that trends are mostly non-linear. Non-linearity in ΔGWS derives, in part, from the episodic nature of groundwater replenishment associated with extreme precipitation.

CL Climate: Past, Present & Future Highlight articles