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Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences

A revision of the Combined Drought Indicator (CDI)used in the European Drought Observatory (EDO)

Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences
DOI 10.5194/nhess-21-481-2021
19 February 2021

Building on almost 10 years of expertise and operational application of the Combined Drought Indicator (CDI), which is implemented within the European Commission’s European Drought Observatory (EDO) for the purposes of early warning and monitoring of agricultural droughts in Europe, this paper proposes a revised version of the index.

Coordinating an operational data distribution network for CMIP6 data

The distribution of data contributed to the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) is via the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF). The ESGF is a network of internationally distributed sites that together work as a federated data archive.

A methodology for attributing the role of climate change in extreme events: a global spectrally nudged storyline

Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences
DOI 10.5194/nhess-21-171-2021
8 February 2021

Extreme weather events are generally associated with unusual dynamical conditions, yet the signal-to-noise ratio of the dynamical aspects of climate change that are relevant to extremes appears to be small, and the nature of the change can be highly uncertain.

Downsizing parameter ensembles for simulations of rare floods

Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences
DOI 10.5194/nhess-20-3521-2020
15 January 2021

This work proposes methods for reducing the computational requirements of hydrological simulations for the estimation of very rare floods that occur on average less than once in 1000 years. These methods enable the analysis of long streamflow time series (here for example 10 000 years) at low computational costs and with modelling uncertainty. They are to be used within continuous simulation frameworks with long input time series and are readily transferable to similar simulation tasks.

New global characterisation of landslide exposure

Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences
DOI 10.5194/nhess-20-3413-2020
12 January 2021

Landslides cause thousands of fatalities and cost billions of dollars of damage worldwide every year, but different inventories of landslide events can have widely diverging completeness. This can lead to spatial biases in our understanding of the impacts. Here we use a globally homogeneous model of landslide hazard and exposure to provide consistent estimates of where landslides are most likely to cause damage to people, roads and other critical infrastructure at 1 km resolution.

A systematic exploration of satellite radar coherence methods for rapid landslide detection

Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences
DOI 10.5194/nhess-20-3197-2020
25 December 2020

Satellite radar could provide information on landslide locations within days of an earthquake or rainfall event anywhere on Earth, but until now there has been a lack of systematic testing of possible radar methods, and most methods have been demonstrated using a single case study event and data from a single satellite sensor. Here we test five methods on four events, demonstrating their wide applicability and making recommendations on when different methods should be applied in the future.

European daily precipitation according to EURO-CORDEX regionalclimate models (RCMs) andhigh-resolution globalclimate models (GCMs) from the High-Resolution Model Intercomparison Project (HighResMIP)

Now that global climate models (GCMs) can run at similar resolutions to regional climate models (RCMs), one may wonder whether GCMs and RCMs provide similar regional climate information. We perform an evaluation for daily precipitation distribution in PRIMAVERA GCMs (25–50 km resolution) and CORDEX RCMs (12–50 km resolution) over Europe. We show that PRIMAVERA and CORDEX simulate similar distributions. Considering both datasets at such a resolution results in large benefits for impact studies.

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.

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.

NH Natural Hazards Highlight articles

Highlight articles

A revision of the Combined Drought Indicator (CDI)used in the European Drought Observatory (EDO)

Coordinating an operational data distribution network for CMIP6 data

A methodology for attributing the role of climate change in extreme events: a global spectrally nudged storyline

Downsizing parameter ensembles for simulations of rare floods

New global characterisation of landslide exposure

A systematic exploration of satellite radar coherence methods for rapid landslide detection

European daily precipitation according to EURO-CORDEX regionalclimate models (RCMs) andhigh-resolution globalclimate models (GCMs) from the High-Resolution Model Intercomparison Project (HighResMIP)

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

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

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

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