Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Climate
Glacier preservation doubled by limiting warming to 1.5°C
Published: 2024-12-15
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Glaciology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Glaciers adapt slowly to changing climatic conditions, resulting in long-term changes in their mass with implications for sea level rise and water supply, even if the climate were to stabilize. Using eight glacier evolution models, we simulate global glacier evolution over multi-centennial timescales, allowing glaciers to equilibrate with climate under various constant global temperature [...]
Disappearance of Homo floresiensis from Liang Bua alongside seasonal aridification of Flores 61,000-47,000 years ago
Published: 2024-12-10
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Fresh Water Studies, Geochemistry, Hydrology, Paleobiology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Speleology
The cause of the disappearance of the primitive hominin, Homo floresiensis, from the Indonesian island of Flores ~50,000 years ago is a key question in palaeoanthropology. The potential roles of human agency and climate change continue to be debated, but the history of freshwater availability critical to survival at the type locality, Liang Bua, remains unknown. Although speleothem 18O is used [...]
Smoke in your eyes: Investigating the effects of wind power on weather trends and climate using time series analysis
Published: 2024-12-04
Subjects: Climate
Time series analysis developed in the previous report [1] for UK mean summer temperature has been applied to further examples of weather trends, including temperature, rainfall and Sahara dust, and so at global, regional, national and local levels, in an attempt to assess whether wind power is having a deleterious effect on weather patterns. The analysis involves detrending weather data by [...]
Exposure to compound climate hazards transmitted via global agricultural trade networks
Published: 2024-11-15
Subjects: Agriculture, Climate, Environmental Studies, Risk Analysis
Compound climate hazards, such as co-occurring temperature and precipitation extremes, substantially impact people and ecosystems. Internal climate variability combines with the forced global warming response to determine both the magnitude and spatial distribution of these events, and their consequences can propagate from one country to another via many pathways. We examine how exposure to [...]
How unusual was Australia's 2017-2019 Tinderbox Drought?
Published: 2024-09-19
Subjects: Climate
Designing a scenario of unilateral climate intervention
Published: 2024-09-11
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Studies, International and Area Studies, Other Environmental Sciences
Climate change is causing increasingly alarming global impacts, such as rising temperatures and more severe storms. Despite this, current multilateral initiatives and agreements to systematically reduce greenhouse gas emissions are completely incommensurate with the scale of the problem. Thus, we explore the potential that some unilateral actor, finding present and near-future climate changes [...]
Signal-to-noise errors in early winter Euro-Atlantic predictions caused by weak ENSO teleconnections and pervasive North Atlantic jet biases
Published: 2024-09-03
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Long-range winter predictions over the Euro-Atlantic sector have demonstrated significant skill but suffer from systematic signal-to-noise errors. In this study we examine early winter seasonal predictability in 16 state-of-the-art seasonal forecasting systems. Models demonstrate skill in the hindcasts of the large-scale atmospheric circulation in early winter, which mostly projects onto the East [...]
Dynamical controls on intensity-duration characteristics of heatwaves in an idealised model
Published: 2024-08-22
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate
An idealised climate model is used to study the contribution of the atmospheric circulation to the intensity-duration characteristics of heatwaves. Using the observed correlation between near-surface temperature and lower tropospheric dry static energy (DSE), we study the energetics of the lower troposphere during heatwaves in the model. We observe that, remarkably, the intensity-duration [...]
Multi-temporal elevation changes of Fedchenko Glacier (Tajikistan) from 1928 to 2021
Published: 2024-07-29
Subjects: Climate, Other Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
The Fedchenko Glacier in Tajikistan's central Pamir region is one of Asia's longest glacier and has been a focal point for scientific investigation spanning the 20th and 21st centuries, yielding a valuable historical dataset for Central Asia. This study explores elevation changes from 1928 to 2021 from topographic maps from 1928 and 1958, KH-9 spy satellite data from 1980, SPOT5 satellite data [...]
The impact of abrupt sunlight reduction scenarios on renewable energy production
Published: 2024-07-26
Subjects: Climate, Engineering
To combat global warming, energy systems are transitioning to generation from renewable sources, such as wind and solar, which are sensitive to climate conditions. While their output is expected to be little affected by global warming, wind and solar electricity generation could be affected by more drastic climatic changes, such as abrupt sunlight reduction scenarios (ASRSs) caused by nuclear war [...]
More biomass burning aerosol is being advected westward over the southern tropical Atlantic since 2003
Published: 2024-07-26
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate
Each year, agricultural fires in southern continental Africa emit approximately one third of the world’s biomass burning aerosol. This is advected westward by the prevailing circulation winds over a subtropical stratocumulus cloud deck. The radiative effects from the aerosol and aerosol-cloud interactions impact regional circulations and hydrology. Here we examine how concurrent changes in the [...]
Amplifying Exploration of Regional Climate Risks: Clustering Future Projections on Regionally Relevant Impact Drivers Not Emission Scenarios
Published: 2024-07-17
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Hydrology, Meteorology, Other Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Risk Analysis
Climate impacts will continue to evolve over the coming decades, requiring regions worldwide to obtain actionable climate information. Global Climate Models (GCMs) are often used to explore future conditions, but the variability of projections among GCMs complicates regional climate risk assessments. This variability in future projections is only partly explained by the often-used emission [...]
Skilful probabilistic predictions of UK floods months ahead using machine learning models trained on multimodel ensemble climate forecasts
Published: 2024-07-12
Subjects: Climate, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Seasonal streamflow forecasts are an important component of flood risk management. Hybrid forecasting methods that predict seasonal streamflow using machine learning models driven by climate model outputs are currently underexplored, yet have some important advantages over traditional approaches using hydrological models. Here we develop a hybrid subseasonal to seasonal streamflow forecasting [...]
Climate equivalence metrics for airline contrail mitigation
Published: 2024-07-10
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Studies, Sustainability
The aviation sector faces a significant challenge in mitigating climate change due to the dual impact of CO2 emissions and contrail formation. Contrails, which form under specific atmospheric conditions, contribute to global warming. Mitigating contrails, however, can require flight path diversions, leading to increased fuel consumption and CO2 emissions. This study evaluates various climate [...]
Increasingly seasonal jet stream raises risk of co-occurring flooding and extreme wind in Great Britain
Published: 2024-07-03
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Hydrology, Multivariate Analysis
Insurers and risk managers for critical infrastructure such as transport or power networks typically do not account for flooding and extreme winds happening at the same time in their quantitative risk assessments. We explore this potentially critical underestimation of risk from these co-occurring hazards through studying events using the regional 12 km resolution UK Climate Projections for a [...]