scholarly journals Climate effects on the onset of flowering in the United Kingdom

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nigel Fox ◽  
Anna Maria Jönsson
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Time Series ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
Response Rates ◽  
Extreme Weather ◽  
Extreme Weather Event ◽  
Negative Response ◽  
Wild Plant ◽  
Weather Event ◽  
The United Kingdom

Abstract Background A warmer climate has consequences for the timing of phenological events, as temperature is a key factor controlling plant development and flowering. In this study, we analyse the effects of the long-term climate change and an extreme weather event on the first flowering day (FFD) of five spring-flowering wild plant species in the United Kingdom. Citizen science data from the UK Woodland Trust were obtained for five species: Tussilago farfara (coltsfoot), Anemone nemorosa (wood anemone), Hyacinthoides non-scripta (bluebell), Cardamine pratensis (cuckooflower) and Alliaria petiolate (garlic mustard). Results Out of the 351 site-specific time series (≥ 15-years of FFD records), 74.6% showed significant negative response rates, i.e. earlier flowering in warmer years, ranging from − 5.6 to − 7.7 days °C−1. 23.7% of the series had non-significant negative response rates, and 1.7% had non-significant positive response rates. For cuckooflower, the response rate was increasingly more negative with decreasing latitudes. The winter of 2007 reflects an extreme weather event, about 2 °C warmer compared to 2006, where the 2006 winter temperatures were similar to the 1961–1990 baseline average. The FFD of each species was compared between 2006 and 2007. The results showed that the mean FFD of all species significantly advanced between 13 and 18 days during the extreme warmer winter of 2007, confirming that FFD is affected by temperature. Conclusion Given that all species in the study significantly respond to ambient near-surface temperatures, they are suitable as climate-change indicators. However, the responses to a + 2 °C warmer winter were both more and less pronounced than expected from an analysis of ≥ 15-year time series. This may reflect non-linear responses, species-specific thresholds and cumulative temperature effects. It also indicates that knowledge on extreme weather events is needed for detailed projections of potential climate change effects.

scholarly journals Imagine

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 46-50
Author(s):  
Lin Lune
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Extreme Weather ◽  
Extreme Weather Event ◽  
Basic Unit ◽  
Ice Storm ◽  
Weather Event ◽  
Immigrant Experience

This piece of prose presents an imagined scenario of a city in ruins and explores the materialistic side of the idea of home. Speaking directly to the reader, this story asks us to consider the role of family within the basic unit of community, in a child’s experience, and of course, in survival. The immigrant experience is considered: is purposefully selling everything parallel to losing everything in a disaster? This story also encourages the reader to think about the what-ifs in light of climate change—the rising chance of your home being hit by an ice storm, hurricane, or another extreme weather event—in the Anthropocene.

The Extreme Weather Event Real-time Attribution Machine (EWERAM) – An Overview

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jordis Tradowsky ◽  
Greg Bodeker ◽  
Leroy Bird ◽  
Stefanie Kremser ◽  
Peter Kreft ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Public Awareness ◽  
Extreme Weather ◽  
Extreme Weather Event ◽  
Extreme Weather Events ◽  
Weather Event ◽  
Business Innovation ◽  
Weather Events

<p>As greenhouse gases continue to accumulate in Earth’s atmosphere, the nature of extreme weather events (EWEs) has been changing and is expected to change in the future. EWEs have contributions from anthropogenic climate change as well as from natural variability, which complicates attribution statements. EWERAM is a project that has been funded through the New Zealand Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment Smart Ideas programme to develop the capability to provide, within days of an EWE having occurred over New Zealand, and while public interest is still high, scientifically defensible statements about the role of climate change in both the severity and frequency of that event. This is expected to raise public awareness and understanding of the effects of climate change on EWEs.</p><p>A team of researchers from five institutions across New Zealand are participating in EWERAM. EWE attribution is a multi-faceted problem and different approaches are required to address different research aims. Although robustly assessing the contribution of changes in the thermodynamic state to an observed event can be more tractable than including changes in the dynamics of weather systems, for New Zealand, changes in dynamics have had a large impact on the frequency and location of EWEs. As such, we have initiated several lines of research to deliver metrics on EWE attribution, tailored to meet the needs of various stakeholders, that encompass the effects of both dynamical and thermodynamical changes in the atmosphere. This presentation will give an overview of EWERAM and present the methodologies and tools used in the project.</p>

scholarly journals Tropicality and the Choc en Retour of Covid-19 and Climate Change

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-93
Author(s):  
Daniel Clayton
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
Extreme Weather ◽  
Epidemic Disease ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Science Theory ◽  
Boomerang Effect ◽  
Tropical Areas ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Tropics

This article reads ‘pandemic, plague, pestilence and the tropics’ through Covid-19, climate change and the discourse of tropicality.  It asks: What happens, as seems to be the case today, when the temperate/tropical oppositions around which tropicality revolves start to unravel because the aberrations and excesses (here of epidemic disease and extreme weather) hitherto deemed to belong to tropical areas, and as constitutive of their otherness, are found in temperate ones? This question is broached with a focus on the United Kingdom as one such ‘temperate’ place that currently finds itself in this situation (although the argument has broader resonance), and with Aimé Césaire’s ideas about the choc en retour (boomerang effect) of Western colonisation and la quotidienneté des barbaries (the daily barbarisms) by which this effect works. Evidence and feelers from science, theory, politics, and the media are used to consider how sensibilities of tropicality, and especially (as Césaire enquired) distinctions between the ‘normal’ and ‘pathological,’ and ‘immunity’ and ‘susceptibility,’ permeate the way Covid-19 and climate change are perceived and felt in the temperate world.

scholarly journals Analysis of an Extreme Weather Event in a Hyper Arid Region Using WRF-Hydro Coupling, Station, and Satellite data

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Youssef Wehbe ◽  
Marouane Temimi ◽  
Michael Weston ◽  
Naira Chaouch ◽  
Oliver Branch ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Soil Moisture ◽  
United Arab Emirates ◽  
Hydrological Modeling ◽  
Flash Flood ◽  
Pearson Correlation ◽  
Global Radiation ◽  
Wrf Model ◽  
Extreme Weather ◽  
Extreme Weather Event ◽  
Weather Event

Abstract. This study investigates an extreme weather event that impacted the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in March 2016 using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model version 3.7.1 coupled with its hydrological modeling extension package (Hydro). Six-hourly forecasted forcing records at 0.5o spatial resolution, obtained from the NCEP Global Forecast System (GFS), are used to drive the three nested downscaling domains of both standalone WRF and coupled WRF/WRF-Hydro configurations for the recent flood-triggering storm. Ground and satellite observations over the UAE are employed to validate the model results. Precipitation, soil moisture, and cloud fraction retrievals from GPM (30-minute, 0.1o product), AMSR2 (daily, 0.1o product), and MODIS (daily, 5 km product), respectively, are used to assess the model output. The Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC), relative bias (rBIAS) and root-mean-square error (RMSE) are used as performance measures. Results show reductions of 24 % and 13 % in RMSE and rBIAS measures, respectively, in precipitation forecasts from the coupled WRF/WRF-Hydro model configuration, when compared to standalone WRF. The coupled system also shows improvements in global radiation forecasts, with reductions of 45 % and 12 % for RMSE and rBIAS, respectively. Moreover, WRF-Hydro was able to simulate the spatial distribution of soil moisture reasonably well across the study domain when compared to AMSR2 satellite soil moisture estimates, despite a noticeable dry/wet bias in areas where soil moisture is high/low. The demonstrated improvement, at the local scale, implies that WRF-Hydro coupling may enhance hydrologic forecasts and flash flood guidance systems in the region.

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