The World Meteorological Organization’s State of the Climate in Asia 2024 report warns that the region is warming nearly twice as fast as the global average, driving more extreme weather and posing serious threats to lives, ecosystems, and economies. In 2024, Asia experienced its warmest or second warmest year on …
Harvest strategies, also known as management procedures (MPs), are pre-agreed frameworks for making fisheries management decisions, such as setting quotas. Although different management bodies name and define them slightly differently, all harvest strategies include the same basic elements: a monitoring program; indicators of the fishery’s status and health, with associated …
The evolution of industrial-era warming across the continents and oceans provides a context for future climate change and is important for determining climate sensitivity and the processes that control regional warming. Here we use post-AD 1500 palaeoclimate records to show that sustained industrial-era warming of the tropical oceans first developed …
We present estimates for an upper limit for twenty-year return-values for 24-hr precipitation at different locations in Europe and a crude method to quantify bounds of likely intervals. Our results suggest an increase by as much as 40–50 % projected for 2100, assuming a high emission scenario, RCP8.5. The new …
The Amazon is ready to burn. After an unusually dry rainy season, the southern section of the rainforest is heading into winter with the largest moisture deficit since 1998. This has set the stage for an unusually intense fire season, according to a forecast issued on 29 June that is …
Water evaporating from the ocean sustains precipitation on land. This ocean-to-land moisture transport leaves an imprint on sea surface salinity (SSS). Thus, the question arises of whether variations in SSS can provide insight into terrestrial precipitation. This study provides evidence that springtime SSS in the subtropical North Atlantic ocean can …
Nitrogen oxides are essential for the formation of secondary atmospheric aerosols and of atmospheric oxidants such as ozone and the hydroxyl radical, which controls the self-cleansing capacity of the atmosphere. Nitric acid, a major oxidation product of nitrogen oxides, has traditionally been considered to be a permanent sink of nitrogen …
What would extensive fishery reform look like? In addition, what would be the benefits and trade-offs of implementing alternative approaches to fisheries management on a worldwide scale? To find out, we assembled the largest-of-its-kind database and coupled it to state-of-the-art bioeconomic models for more than 4,500 fisheries around the world. …
Extreme and large-scale warming events in the ocean have been dubbed marine heatwaves,and these have been documented in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. This paper examinesthe intensity, duration, and frequency of positive sea surface temperature anomalies in the North Atlanticand North Pacific Oceans over the period 1950–2014 using an …
Marine plastic pollution is an ever-increasing problem that demands immediate mitigation and reduction plans. Here, a model based on satellite-tracked buoy observations and scaled to a large data set of observations on microplastic from surface trawls was used to simulate the transport of plastics floating on the ocean surface from …
Small glaciers and ice caps respond rapidly to climate variations, and records of their past extent provide information on the natural envelope of past climate variability. Millennial-scale trends in Holocene glacier size are well documented and correspond with changes in Northern Hemisphere summer insolation. However, there is only sparse and …
Quasi-decadal variability in solar irradiance has been suggested to exert a substantial effect on Earth’s regional climate. In the North Atlantic sector, the 11-year solar signal has been proposed to project onto a pattern resembling the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), with a lag of a few years due to ocean-atmosphere …
The North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) is the major source of variability in winter atmospheric circulation in the Northern Hemisphere, with large impacts on temperature, precipitation and storm tracks, and therefore also on strategic sectors such as insurance, renewable energy production, crop yields and water management. Recent developments in dynamical methods …
The air–sea transfer of heat and fresh water plays a critical role in the global climate system. This is particularly true for the Greenland and Iceland seas, where these fluxes drive ocean convection that contributes to Denmark Strait overflow water, the densest component of the lower limb of the Atlantic …
Our current understanding of ocean–atmosphere–cryosphere interactions at ice-age terminations relies largely on assessments of the most recent (last) glacial–interglacial transition, Termination I (T-I). But the extent to which T-I is representative of previous terminations remains unclear. Testing the consistency of termination processes requires comparison of time series of critical climate …
This paper presents key results from analysis of surface meteorological observations collected in the Northern Arabian/Persian Gulf (N Gulf; Kuwait, Bahrain, and NE Saudi Arabia), which spans a 40-years period (1973–2012). The first part of this study analyzes climate variability in the N Gulf, and relates them to teleconnection patterns …
It is known that the Sun plays an important part in controlling the Earth's climate, but now researchers show that solar activity affects climate change more than previously thought, according to recent research. Researchers reported Thursday that natural oscillations in the climate, which resulted in cooler Pacific Ocean waters, were …
Ship tracks provide an ideal test bed for studying aerosol–cloud interactions (ACIs) and for evaluating their representation in model parameterisations. Regional modelling can be of particular use for this task, as this approach provides sufficient resolution to resolve the structure of the produced track including their meteorological environment whilst relying …
Numerical model scenarios of future climate depict a global increase in temperatures and changing precipitation patterns, primarily driven by increasing greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations. Aerosol particles also play an important role by altering the Earth's radiation budget and consequently surface temperature. Here, we use the general circulation aerosol model ECHAM5-HAM, …
Marine debris, mostly consisting of plastic, is a global problem, negatively impacting wildlife, tourism and shipping. However, despite the durability of plastic, and the exponential increase in its production, monitoring data show limited evidence of concomitant increasing concentrations in marine habitats. There appears to be a considerable proportion of the …
THE “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” lies off the coast of California. But it is not the only place where a system of rotating ocean currents, known as gyres, concentrate floating material, particularly plastic detritus dumped into the sea or washed out from rivers. There is an awful lot of it: …
