Category Archives: Cryosphere

How can we contribute to extreme event attribution in the Arctic?

By: Daniela Flocco News of broken temperature records, droughts and extreme climate events are nowadays constantly present in newspapers and on social media. The study of the connection between extreme and global climate changes has become subject of an area … Continue reading

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Science outreach in coastal Arctic communities

By: Lucia Hosekova Figure 1: NASA image by Robert Simmon based on Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) surface temperature analysis data including ship and buoy data from the Hadley Centre. Caption by Adam Voiland. Few people are more aware … Continue reading

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Modelling Ice Sheets in the global Earth System

By: Robin Smith As Till wrote recently, our national flagship climate model (UKESM1, the UK Earth System Model) has been officially released for the community to use, after more than six years in development by a team drawn from across … Continue reading

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It melts from the top too …

By David Ferreira The global sea level rises at about 3 mm/year. Oceans absorb nearly 90% of the heat trapped in the atmosphere by anthropogenic gases like carbon dioxide. As water warms, it expands: this effect explains about half of … Continue reading

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Potential links between Arctic sea ice loss and mid-latitude weather: revisiting an influential earlier study

by Len Shaffrey The Arctic is changing rapidly due to human emissions of greenhouse gases. Arctic sea ice extent has been declining by 12% per decade since reliable satellite estimates began in 1979. By summer 2012, Arctic sea ice extent … Continue reading

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Melt ponds over Arctic sea ice

By Daniela Flocco Melt ponds develop over Arctic sea ice during the melting season from the accumulation of melt water from ice and snow. These have become increasingly important over the last few decades because they have been more prevalent … Continue reading

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Polar Prediction School

By Jonny Day During the last 2 weeks Dr Jonny Day spent two weeks lecturing and coordinating a Polar Prediction School for graduate students and early career researchers. The school is a joint initiative from the World Weather Research Programme … Continue reading

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The melting of Arctic sea ice and the future of trans-Arctic shipping

By Keith Haines Most people will be familiar with news of the changing conditions in the Arctic where climate change seems to be at its fastest. The loss of sea ice each summer seems to show a rapidly declining trend, … Continue reading

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Projecting climate changes for the Earth System

By Robin Smith With the COP21 UN climate change conference going on in Paris, questions about how the global environment will change in the coming decades and what impact that will have on the people and communities that live in … Continue reading

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Sea Ice: a story of cracks

By Harry Heorton Ice, on a scale you can hold in your hands, is a brittle material. When it deforms it cracks into smaller pieces. Imagine hitting an ice cube with a hammer: lots of smaller pieces of ice. They … Continue reading

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