Periodic and quantitative assessment of research activities in a given area is an essential step to ensure identification of priority and niche areas. White-space, a term borrowed from spectrum analysis, in this context refers to areas of research (frequency bands) that are less explored. Thus white-space mapping or analysis identifies relative strength of research, and enables us to uncover opportunities that are not obvious or less explored. (Scientific Correspondence)

Continental ice sheets are a key component of the Earth’s climate system, but their internal dynamics need to be further studied.

Past global climate changes had strong regional expression. To elucidate their spatio-temporal pattern, we reconstructed past
temperatures for seven continental-scale regions during the past one to two millennia. The most coherent feature in nearly all
of the regional temperature reconstructions is a long-term cooling trend, which ended late in the nineteenth century. At multidecadal to centennial scales, temperature variability shows distinctly different regional patterns, with more similarity within

Reliable forecasts of future ‘megadroughts’ would be a boon to farmers and water managers. But results presented last week at the annual assembly of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna suggest that such forecasts are still beyond the reach of current climate models.

Geochemical study of a 3.55 m long lake sediment core from the Badanital Lake (Garhwal Himalaya) reveals Late Holocene centennial-scale climatic changes. The ecosystem of the tectonically formed lake seems to be controlled by natural and anthropogenic factors.

Prediction of monsoon changes in the coming decades is important for infrastructure planning and sustainable economic development. The decadal prediction involves both natural decadal variability and anthropogenic forcing. Hitherto, the causes of the decadal variability of Northern Hemisphere summer monsoon (NHSM) are largely unknown because the monsoons over Asia, West Africa, and North America have been studied primarily on a regional basis, which is unable to identify coherent decadal changes and the overriding controls on planetary scales.

In recent years, the Northern Hemisphere has suffered several devastating regional summer weather extremes, such as the European heat wave in 2003, the Russian heat wave and the Indus river flood in Pakistan in 2010, and the heat wave in the United States in 2011. Here, we propose a common mechanism for the generation of persistent longitudinal planetary-scale high-amplitude patterns of the atmospheric circulation in the Northern Hemisphere midlatitudes.
Those patterns—with zonal wave numbers m = 6, 7, or 8—are characteristic of the above extremes.

Whereas fossil evidence indicates extensive treeless vegetation and diverse grazing megafauna in Europe and northern Asia during the last glacial, experiments combining vegetation models and climate models have to-date simulated widespread persistence of trees. Resolving this conflict is key to understanding both last glacial ecosystems and extinction of most of the mega-herbivores. Using a dynamic vegetation model (DVM) we explored the implications of the differing climatic conditions generated by a general circulation model (GCM) in “normal” and “hosing” experiments.

Approximately 1700 Pg of soil carbon (C) are stored in the northern circumpolar permafrost zone, more than twice as much C than in the atmosphere. The overall amount, rate, and form of C released to the atmosphere in a warmer world will influence the strength of the permafrost C feedback to climate change. We used a survey to quantify variability in the perception of the vulnerability of permafrost C to climate change.