Recent  

This study observed the marked interannual differences in the vegetation response to the trend towards a warmer and wetter climate in northwest China. And found that the influence of precipitation to vegetation has gradually become stronger from 1982 to 2019 in northwest China, whereas which of temperature has gradually become weaker.

We analyse the duration of large scale patterns of air movement in the atmosphere, referred to as persistence, and whether unusually persistent patterns favour high temperatures in Europe. We find that unseasonally warm weather in winter often occurs when the patterns are very persistent. However, we see no such relationship for summertime heatwaves. Therefore, heatwaves do not require the continued flow of warm air over a region, suggesting local effects could be important for their occurrence.

Complex systems can undergo abrupt changes or ‘tipping points’ when external forcing crosses a critical level and are of increasing concern because of their severe impacts. However, tipping points can also occur when the external forcing changes too quickly, without crossing any critical levels, which is very relevant for Earth’s systems and contemporary climate. We give an intuitive explanation of such rate-induced tipping and provide illustrative examples from natural and human systems.

Apparent temperatures that include humidity and wind speed in addition to surface temperature measure human heat stress and comfort. We show that apparent temperatures will reach dangerous levels more commonly in future and rise faster than air temperatures because of water vapor pressure rises and lower expected wind speeds. Solar geoengineering can reduce the frequency of extreme events significantly relative to modest, and especially “business as usual” greenhouse scenarios.

Records of past carbon isotopes exhibit oscillations. It is clear over very different time periods, that oscillations of 400 kyr take place. Also, strong oscillations of approximately 8–9 Myr are seen over different time periods. While earlier modelling studies have been able to produce 400 kyr oscillations, none of them produced 8–9 Myr cycles. Here, we propose a simple model for the carbon cycle that is able to produce 8–9 Myr oscillations in the modelled carbon isotopes.

Causal model evaluation is helping to better understand remote contributions to internal variability over specific regions. The approach and findings presented in this study have the potential of bringing up a powerful methodology that can be applied in a number of environment-related topics, offering tremendous insight to improve the understanding of the complex earth system and the state-of-the-art of climate modeling.

Spatially compounding soy harvest failures can have important global impacts. Using causal networks, we show that soy yields are predominately driven by summer soil moisture conditions in North and South America. Summer soil moisture is effected by antecedent soil moisture as well as remote extra-tropical SST patterns in both hemispheres. Both of these soil moisture drivers are again influenced by ENSO. Our results highlight physical pathways by which ENSO can drive spatially compounding events.