Recent  

Ecosystem resistance reflects their susceptibility during adverse conditions and can be modulated by land management. We estimate ecosystem resistance to drought and heat globally. We find a higher resistance to drought in forests compared to croplands and an evident loss of resistance to drought when primary forests are converted to secondary forests. Old-growth trees tend to be more resistant than younger trees in some forests and crops benefit from irrigation during drought periods.

Researchers investigating the deep history of life on Earth, and its place in the cosmos can offer a unique perspective on global crises. It takes the entire biosphere to support us, a biosphere that has co-evolved with Earth over billions of years. Combining astronomical observations with Earth's geological record demonstrates that our only viable home is Earth. We call on our colleagues to connect their research with global issues and to engage with them as agents of the scientific enterprise.

While a 6-year oscillation has been reported for some time in the motions of the fluid outer core of the Earth, in the magnetic field and in the Earth rotation, novel results indicate that the climate system also oscillates at this 6 year frequency. This strongly suggests the existence of coupling mechanisms affecting the Earth system as a whole, from the deep Earth interior to the surface fluid envelopes.

The Indonesian Throughflow is an important pathway connecting the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Solar dimming and sulfate aerosol injection geoengineering will affect the water volumes transported in future – but so will increasing greenhouse gases. Geoengineering with sulfate aerosols affects winds more than simply “shading the sun” and reduces the water transport more – similar as we simulate for unabated greenhouse gas emissions.

The carbon budget approach directly links temperature with the sum of the preceding emissions without the need to generate and compare different emission scenarios. In this work we detect and quantify possible deviations from the carbon budget approach, separating them as scenario-dependent and state-dependent deviations and explaining them through the lens of Green's function. Additionally, an improved analytical budget equation is derived.

Savannas account for over half of the global landscape fire emissions. Although environmental and fuel conditions affect the ratio of species the fire emits, these dynamics have not been implemented in global models. We measured CO₂, CO, CH₄ and N₂O emission factors (EFs), fuel parameters and fire severity proxies during 129 individual fires. We identified EF patterns, and trained models to estimate EFs of these species based on satellite observations, reducing the estimation error by 60–85 %.

Injecting SO₂ into the lower stratosphere can temporarily reduce the global mean temperature and mitigate some of the risks associated with climate change, but injecting at different latitudes and seasons would have different impacts. This study introduces a comprehensive set of SAI strategies and systematically explores the importance of the choice of SAI strategy, demonstrating that it notably affects the distribution of aerosol cloud, injection efficiency, and various surface climate impacts.

Climate models are used to predict the impact of climate change. However, poorly constrained parameters used in the physics of the models mean that we simulate a large spread of possible future outcomes. We can use real-world observations to reduce the uncertainty of parameter values, but we do not have observations to reduce the spread of possible future outcomes directly. We present a method for translating the reduction in parameter uncertainty into a reduction in possible model projections.

We investigate the impacts of anthropogenic water regulation on riverine DOC transport by the developed model. The results suggested that DOC transport in most rivers was mainly influenced by reservoir interception and surface water withdrawal. The impact of human water regulation on riverine DOC exports grew year by year. In general, this study developed an effective scheme to simulate DOC exports from terrestrial to aquatic systems, which is important for estimating global carbon budgets.

Weather persistence on sub-seasonal to seasonal timescales has been a topic of research since the early days of meteorology. Stationary or recurrent behaviour are common features of weather dynamics, and are strongly related to fundamental physical processes, weather predictability and surface weather impacts. In this review, we propose a typology for the broad concepts related to persistence and discuss various methods that have been used to characterise persistence in weather data.

Land cover and land management changes are important strategies for future land-based mitigation. We investigate the climate effects of cropland expansion, afforestation, irrigation, and wood harvesting using three Earth system models. Results show that these have important implications for surface temperature where the land cover and/or management change occurs and in remote areas. Idealized afforestation causes global warming, which might offset the cooling effect from enhanced carbon uptake.

The Baltic Earth Assessment Reports summarise the current state of knowledge on Earth system science in the Baltic Sea region. The 10 review articles focus on the regional water, biogeochemical and carbon cycles, extremes and natural hazards, sea-level dynamics and coastal erosion, marine ecosystems, coupled Earth system models, scenario simulations for the regional atmosphere and the Baltic Sea, and climate change and impacts of human use. Here, some highlights of the results are presented.

The change in extreme event occurrence is influenced by both a shift in the mean and a change in variability. How large the individual contributions from either of them is, is largely unknown. Large-ensemble climate simulations and the probability risk ratio are used to partition the change in extreme precipitation events into contributions from a change in the mean and variability. The results reveal that the change in variability can be equally or even more important than the mean change.

Nitrogen (N) is an essential limiting nutrient to terrestrial carbon (C) sequestration. We evaluate N cycling in an ensemble of terrestrial biosphere models. We find that they simulate significant variability in N processes. Models tended to overestimate C storage per unit N in vegetation and soil, which could have consequences for projecting the future terrestrial C sink. However, N cycling measurements are highly uncertain and more are necessary to guide the development of N cycling in models.

We examine the links between the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the North Tropical Atlantic mode (NTA) using outputs from model simulations and reanalysis data. Our results suggest robust effects of ENSO on NTA and provide insights on the unstable impacts of NTA on ENSO. Our results show that the models may underestimate the impacts of NTA on ENSO, implying that better representation of NTA variability and NTA-ENSO links in the models may improve the predictability of ENSO variations.

This study utilizes the reduced-complexity model, Framework for Evaluating Damages and Impacts (FrEDI), to assess the impacts from climate change in the United States, across 10,000 future probabilistic emission and socioeconomic projections. Climate-driven damages are largest for the health category, with the majority of damages in this category from the valuation estimates of premature mortality attributable to climate-driven changes in extreme temperature and air quality.