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Invited perspectives: The ECMWF strategy 2021–2030 challenges in the area of natural hazards

Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences
DOI 10.5194/nhess-21-2163-2021
23 August 2021

The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts mission is to deliver high-quality global medium‐range (3–15 d ahead of time) weather forecasts and monitoring of the Earth system. We have published a new strategy, and in this paper we discuss what this means for forecasting and monitoring natural hazards.

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Nonstationary weather and water extremes: a review of methods for their detection, attribution, and management

Weather and water extremes have devastating effects each year. One of the principal challenges for society is understanding how extremes are likely to evolve under the influence of changes in climate, land cover, and other human impacts. This paper provides a review of the methods and challenges associated with the detection, attribution, management, and projection of nonstationary weather and water extremes.

Thaw-driven mass wasting couples slopes with downstream systems, and effects propagate through Arctic drainage networks

Climate-driven landslides are transforming glacially conditioned permafrost terrain, coupling slopes with aquatic systems, and triggering a cascade of downstream effects. Nonlinear intensification of thawing slopes is primarily affecting headwater systems where slope sediment yields overwhelm stream transport capacity. The propagation of effects across watershed scales indicates that western Arctic Canada will be an interconnected hotspot of thaw-driven change through the coming millennia.

Additional carbon inputs to reach a 4 per 1000 objective in Europe: feasibility and projected impacts of climate change based on Century simulations of long-term arable experiments

Increasing soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks is beneficial for climate change mitigation and food security. One way to enhance SOC stocks is to increase carbon input to the soil. We estimate the amount of carbon input required to reach a 4 % annual increase in SOC stocks in 14 long-term agricultural experiments around Europe. We found that annual carbon input should increase by 43 % under current temperature conditions, by 54 % for a 1 °C warming scenario and by 120 % for a 5 °C warming scenario.

Tropical deoxygenation sites revisited to investigate oxygen and nutrient trends

Six tropical areas in the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans were investigated for trends for the years since 1950 for temperature, salinity, oxygen and nutrients at 50 to 300 m and 300 to 700 m depth. Generally, temperature increases, oxygen decreases and nutrients often increase. Overlain variability on the trends seem to be related to climate modes. Different trends indicate that oxygen and nutrient trends cannot by completely explained by local warming.

Disparities in particulate matter (PM10) origins and oxidative potential at a city scale (Grenoble, France) – Part 2.

With an enhanced source apportionment obtained in a companion paper, this paper acquires more understanding of the spatiotemporal associations of the sources of PM to oxidative potential (OP), an emerging health-based metric. Multilayer perceptron neural network analysis was used to apportion OP from PM sources. Results showed that such a methodology is as robust as the linear classical inversion and permits an improvement in the OP prediction when local features or non-linear effects occur.

Continental-scale controls on soil organic carbon across sub-Saharan Africa

SOIL
DOI 10.5194/soil-7-305-2021
9 August 2021

We investigated various soil and climate properties that influence soil organic carbon (SOC) concentrations in sub-Saharan Africa. Our findings indicate that climate and geochemistry are equally important for explaining SOC variations. The key SOC-controlling factors are broadly similar to those for temperate regions, despite differences in soil development history between the two regions.

Investigations on the anthropogenic reversal of the natural ozone gradient between northern and southern midlatitudes

The few ozone measurements made before the 1980s indicate that industrial development increased ozone concentrations by a factor of ~ 2 at northern midlatitudes, which are now larger than at southern midlatitudes. This difference was much smaller, and likely reversed, in the pre-industrial atmosphere. Earth system models find similar increases, but not higher pre-industrial ozone in the south. This disagreement may indicate that modeled natural ozone sources and/or deposition loss are inadequate.

Evaluation of ocean dimethylsulfide concentration and emission in CMIP6 models

In this study we analyse surface ocean dimethylsulfide (DMS) concentration and flux to the atmosphere from four CMIP6 Earth system models over the historical and ssp585 simulations. Our analysis of contemporary (1980–2009) climatologies shows that models better reproduce observations in mid to high latitudes. The models disagree on the sign of the trend of the global DMS flux from 1980 onwards. The models agree on a positive trend of DMS over polar latitudes following sea-ice retreat dynamics.

Committed and projected future changes in global peatlands – continued transient model simulations since the Last Glacial Maximum

We present long-term projections of global peatland area and carbon with a continuous transient history since the Last Glacial Maximum. Our novel results show that large parts of today’s northern peatlands are at risk from past and future climate change, with larger emissions clearly connected to larger risks. The study includes comparisons between different emission and land-use scenarios, driver attribution through factorial simulations, and assessments of uncertainty from climate forcing.

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