In a new study in Climate of the Past Dr Thomas Kleinen, Uwe Mikolajewicz, and Prof Victor Brovkin, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M), were able to show that the changes in methane concentration between the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM, about 20000 years ago) and the preindustrial late Holocene (PI), 300 years ago, can be explained entirely by changes in the natural methane emissions caused by environmental changes.
At a very basic level the main job of the climate system is to redistribute energy, specifically solar energy that is received from the sun is converted to thermal energy (or enthalpy) that can then be radiated back to space. The efficiency of this process is what sets the global temperature. This redistribution, and its efficiency, depends on two major modes of enthalpy transport, one from the equator to the poles, the other from the surface to the atmosphere. Existing climate models are…
The Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M) warmly congratulates Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. mult. Hartmut Graßl on the occasion of his 80th birthday on 18 March 2020.
AQ-Watch (Air Quality - Worldwide Analysis & Forecasting of Atmospheric Composition for Health), a new project in the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme, has been launched. It is coordinated by Prof Dr Guy Brasseur at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M). Partners in the project will co-develop and co-produce tailored products and services that can be used by governmental institutions (at local, regional and national levels) and private companies in…
From 20 January through 20 February 2020, the EUREC4A (Elucidating the role of clouds-circulation coupling in climate) field study investigated trade wind clouds in the Tropical Atlantic. The international field study aims at advancing understanding of the interplay between clouds, convection and circulation and their role in climate change.
Dr. Peter Korn, scientist and head of the group "Applied Mathematics and Computational Physics" in the department "The Ocean in the Earth System" at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M) successfully habilitated on January 23, 2020.
From 20 January through 20 February 2020, the EUREC4A (Elucidating the role of clouds-circulation coupling in climate) field study will investigate trade wind clouds in the Tropical Atlantic. EUREC4A is a French-German initiated field study led by Prof Bjorn Stevens, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M) and head of the department “The Atmosphere in the Earth System”, and Dr Sandrine Bony, Director of Research at the Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique, Paris, France.…
One major consequence of global warming is the rising sea level. A study conducted at Universität Hamburg’s Cluster of Excellence for climate research CLICCS by Dr Chao Li, scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M) and his colleagues now shows:
Theresa Lang from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology spent around two weeks on the Caribbean island of Barbados for the cloud research project EUREC4A.
During the last 150 years, the increasing atmospheric concentration of anthropogenic greenhouse gases has been the main driver of climate change. Superimposed on the man-made global warming trend, however, natural variability modulates the climate record on time scales from years to several decades. Natural climate variability encompasses internal variability — spontaneously generated by processes and feedbacks within the climate system and externally forced variability — caused, for example,…
In a Perspective article appearing in this week's Proceedings of the (USA) National Academy of Science (PNAS), Prof Tim Palmer (University of Oxford, UK), and Prof Bjorn Stevens (Max Planck Society, Germany), critically reflect on the present state of Earth system modelling.
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