Climate Science

The Amazon region is one of the ecosystems on the planet most affected by global climate change. The reason is variations in the Ecuador line cause events like floods, droughts and storms that directly affect the environment and the local population.

Not many people could be described as a rainmaker quite as literally as Hannele Korhonen. Korhonen, a research professor at the Finnish Meteorological Institute, is heading a project that aims to improve artificial rainmaking in the United Arab Emirates.

To encourage national and international collaboration, the Motus web portal will make data summaries and visualizations of bird migration tracking data, captured by the small Motus radio transmitters affixed to individual birds, publicly available for education and citizen science purposes.

As weather forecasts are becoming increasingly detailed, data volumes are increasing as well, demanding high-speed connectivity and supercomputing power.

“Water is fundamental to our lives, for food production, and for the health and prosperity of our cities. Both Australia and China face similar challenges around the pro.vision of water in rural and urban areas and for several years we have been working together to find sustainable solutions for water resource management that benefit both nations,” says Professor John Langford.

The Indian summer monsoon is a manifestation of complex interactions between land, ocean and atmosphere and the simulation of its mean pattern and its variability on inter-annual scales is one of the challenging problems in climate studies. The correct prediction of this complex phenomenon is vital to national planning and economic policy making.

Have you ever stopped to think about how weather and climate research influence your daily life? “This science has a direct impact on the daily lives of us all, from small decisions, such as whether to bring a coat or an umbrella or not, to government analyses, such as whether there will be enough water in the reservoirs of the dams of the hydroelectric power plants to produce electricity.”

Three research networks are working together to provide the lifeline of a new meteorology supercomputer running on renewable energy. Through a 10 Gbps redundant fiberoptic cable running 2250 km across the North Atlantic, the Danish Meteorology Institute in Copenhagen connects to its new supercomputer located on Iceland.

Moroccan and French researchers are using high-speed networks to combine their expertise in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and remote sensing to produce new thematic maps of Agadir, Morocco and to monitor this fragile landscape.

Understanding how the environment is altering through ongoing monitoring is key to coping with the effects of climate change. Working with European partners, the Central Asian Institute of Applied Geosciences (CAIAG) in Kyrgyzstan is able to monitor melting glaciers and mitigate the risks to the local population.

Ross Vennell is a man driven by a challenge. He is a physical oceanographer investigating how we could generate electricity from tidal currents, “a bit like having wind turbines under the water”. New Zealand is one of the best places on the planet to extract energy from the ocean, and Ross is trying to estimate how much power we could actually get from turbines.

With extreme weather events increasingly hitting news headlines around the world, accurate and timely forecasts are essential for effective disaster warning and mitigation systems. This, in turn, calls for joint research efforts within the global meteorological community to improve models and tools for predicting severe weather, such as hurricanes, tornadoes, cyclones, floods, heat waves etc.