New webinar by early career scientist

Dr. Marlene Kretschmer
  • Date: Friday, March 25, at 10am CET (9am UTC)
  • Title: The plausible role of Barents and Kara sea ice loss in driving future polar vortex changes
  • Speaker: Dr. Marlene Kretschmer (U. of Reading)
  • The Northern Hemisphere stratospheric polar vortex (SPV) is a band of fast blowing eastward winds, forming in winter over the Arctic. The strength of the SPV affects the weather and climate in the densely populated mid-latitudes and is also linked to stratospheric ozone concentrations. Understanding potential changes in the SPV in response to global warming is therefore of huge scientific and societal interest. However, in what way the SPV will respond to global warming is not clear, with climate models disagreeing on the sign and magnitude of projected SPV strength change. Here we address the potential role of Barents and Kara (BK) sea ice loss in this. Using data from 35 different climate models, we show that the SPV weakens as long as sea ice in this region declines but that it strengthens again once all sea ice is gone. However, the time the BK Seas are ice-free differs between models which explains some of the disagreement regarding the polar vortex projections. We quantify the causal effect of BK sea ice loss on the polar vortex and find it to be plausibly very small.  Yet, given the expected dramatic decrease in sea ice in the future, even a small causal effect can explain all of the projected ensemble-mean SPV weakening, approximately one-half of the ensemble spread in the middle of the 21st century, and one-third of the spread at the end of the century. Finally, we note that most models have unrealistic amounts of BK sea ice, meaning that their SPV response to ice loss is unrealistic. Bias adjusting for this effect leads to pronounced differences in SPV response of individual models at both ends of the spectrum. Overall, our results indicate the importance of exploring all plausible implications of a changing Arctic for regional climate risk assessments.
  • Bio: Dr. Marlene Kretschmer is a research scientist at the University of Reading, UK. Currently she holds an individual Marie Curie fellowship to apply causal inference methods to evaluate the representation of large-scale drivers (such as the stratospheric polar vortex) of European precipitation in climate models. She is an expert in using these novel statistical methods as well as other machine learning algorithms to identify and quantify causal pathways of teleconnections from climate data.
  • Link for the registration: https://univ-lille-fr.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_5PU_GxzXTR2qPbfTcnCW6g

Nobel Prize in Physics 2021

Congratulations to Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann and Girogio Parisi – the  2021 Nobel Prize laureates in physics. The Nobel Prize in Physics 2021 was awarded “for groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of complex systems” with one half jointly to Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann “for the physical modelling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming” and the other half to Giorgio Parisi “for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales.” 

IAMAS Early Career Scientist Medal Award 2021

Dr. Marta Abalos, Universidad Complutense de Madrid

This year’s recipient of the International Association of Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences (IAMAS) Early Career Medal is Dr. Marta Abalos. This medal was established in 2015, and is presented every two years, from a selection of candidates nominated by one of the commissions of IAMAS or the Members at-Large.The medal ceremony will come with a presentation on her work at the upcoming Virtual Atmosphere-Cryosphere-Ocean seminar series (VACO-21) in July 2021.

Tribute for Paul J. Crutzen (1933-2021)

Paul Crutzen at the Anthropocene Symposium 2013.

Paul J. Crutzen (1933-2021), a recognised world leader in atmospheric sciences, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry (1995), Director of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry (1980-2000), and Honorary Member of the International Ozone Commission of IAMAS. An obituary can be found here.

Early Career Scientists

New Early Career Representative, Dr. Jing Li of Peking University, China

We are delighted to announce that Dr. Jing Li of Peking University, China will be joining the Bureau of IAMAS as our Early Career Representative. Jing will be involved in the day-to-day running of our association and helping to promote the activities of IAMAS and its commissions amongst the next generation of atmospheric scientists. Dr. Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick will be joining Jing in IAMAS efforts to promote early career scientists.