Precipitation and its extremes: a study into the hydro-climatological controls of extreme precipitation

Extreme precipitation can be characterized by the tail behavior of precipitation probability distributions.The tail contains the most extreme precipitation events and tells something about both the magnitude and frequency of these events. Here the heaviness amplification factor is used to represent the tail behavior. This research determines the...

Aerosol Absorption from Global Satellite Measurements in the Ultra-Violet: From Qualitative Aerosol Index to Quantitative Aerosol Absorptive Properties

Atmospheric aerosols are solid or liquid particles suspended in the air. The majority of them are produced by natural processes, including sea salt from oceans, mineral dust from (semi-)arid regions, carbon containing particles from wildfires, and sulfates and ash from volcanic activities. Anthropogenic aerosols are produced by industrial...

A Brief Climatology of Dunkelflaute Events over and Surrounding the North and Baltic Sea Areas

In the coming decades, the European energy system is expected to become increasingly reliant on non-dispatchable generation such as wind and solar power. Under such a renewable energy scenario, a better characterization of the extreme weather condition ‘Dunkelflaute’, which can lead to a sustained reduction of wind and solar power, is important....

Field Observations of Atmospheric Aerosol Properties and the Impacts of New Particle Formation on the Radiative Properties of Clouds

Atmospheric aerosol particles are solid or liquid particles suspended in the atmosphere. They are directly emitted into the atmosphere or they are formed via the oxidation of gaseous precursors. Understanding the behavior of particles in the atmosphere is particularly important because they can affect the Earth’s climate, visibility, air quality...

Moisture source changes contributed to different precipitation changes over the northern and southern Tibetan Plateau

Precipitation on the Tibetan Plateau (TP) showed different spatial changes during 1979-2016, with an increasing trend over the northern Tibetan Plateau (NTP) and a slightly negative trend over the southern Tibetan Plateau (STP). The changes in precipitation moisture sources over the NTP and STP are investigated using the improved Water...

Dutch fog: On the observed spatio-temporal variability of fog in the Netherlands

The Netherlands is characterized by highly variable land use within a small area, and a strong influence of the North Sea on national climate. Devoid of significant topography, it is an excellent location for assessing the relative influence of various factors on fog occurrence in the absence of terrain effects. Using observations from a...

Global sea-level contribution from Arctic land ice: 1971-2017

The Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program (AMAP 2017) report identifies the Arctic as the largest regional source of land ice to global sea-level rise in the 2003-2014 period. Yet, this contextualization ignores the longer perspective from in situ records of glacier mass balance. Here, using 17 (>55°N latitude) glacier and ice cap mass...

Seasonal Dependence of Geomagnetic Active-Time Northern High-Latitude Upper Thermospheric Winds

This study is focused on improving the poorly understood seasonal dependence of northern high-latitude F region thermospheric winds under active geomagnetic conditions. The gaps in our understanding of the dynamic high-latitude thermosphere are largely due to the sparseness of thermospheric wind measurements. With current observational...

Local characteristics of the nocturnal boundary layer in response to external pressure forcing

Geostrophic wind speed data, derived from pressure observations, are used in combination with tower measurements to investigate the nocturnal stable boundary layer at Cabauw, the Netherlands. Since the geostrophic wind speed is not directly influenced by local nocturnal stability, it may be regarded as an external forcing parameter of the...

Seasonal dependence of northern high-latitude upper thermospheric winds: A quiet time climatological study based on ground-based and space-based measurements

This paper investigates the large-scale seasonal dependence of geomagnetically quiet time, northern high-latitude F region thermospheric winds by combining extensive observations from eight ground-based (optical remote sensing) and three space-based (optical remote sensing and in situ) instruments. To provide a comprehensive picture of the...

Observed soil moisture–precipitation feedback in Illinois: A systematic analysis over different scales

The lack of understanding on the soil moisture–precipitation feedback mechanisms remains a large source of uncertainty for land–atmosphere coupled models. Previous observation-based studies on the soil moisture–precipitation feedback in Illinois have shown contradictory results. This paper extends earlier research by providing a more holistic...

Stochastic convection parameterization with Markov Chains in an intermediate-complexity GCM

Conditional Markov chain (CMC) models have proven to be promising building blocks for stochastic convection parameterizations. In this paper, it is demonstrated how two different CMC models can be used as mass flux closures in convection parameterizations. More specifically, the CMC models provide a stochastic estimate of the convective area...

Trends in Moderate Rainfall Extremes: A Regional Monotone Regression Approach

Rainfall extremes are thought to have increased over recent years. Typically linear trends have been considered to describe the temporal evolution of high quantiles of the daily rainfall distribution. For long records it is important to allow more flexibility. Quantile regression methods are available to estimate monotone trends for single...

Toepassing klimaatscenario's in het waterbeheer en -beleid

Effects of climate change on the functions of the IJsselmeer area: Report of the NRP project 952210