Clouds have a large impact on the Earth’s radiation budget and hence have the potential to exert strong feedbacks on climate variability and climate change. These feedbacks are not wellunderstood, so it is essential to investigate observed relationships between cloud properties and other parameters of the climate system. Suitable cloud datasets based on surface observations and satellite observ...

Citation: Mesquita MdS, Erikstad KE, Sandvik H, Barrett RT, Reiertsen TK, Anker-Nilssen T, Hodges KI and Bader J (2015) There is more to climate than the North Atlantic Oscillation: a new perspective from climate dynamics to explain the variability in population growth rates of a long-lived seabird. Front. Ecol. Evol. 3:43. doi: 10.3389/fevo.2015.00043 There is more to climate than the North At...

Climate signals are the results of interactions of multiple time scale media such as the atmosphere and ocean in the 15 coupled earth system. Coupled data assimilation (CDA) pursues balanced and coherent climate analysis and prediction initialization by incorporating observations from multiple media into a coupled model. In practice, an observational time window (OTW) is usually used to collect...

Climate variability adversely impacts crop production and imposes a major constraint on farming planning, mostly under rainfed conditions, across the world. Considering the recent advances in climate science, many studies are trying to provide a reliable basis for climate, and subsequently agricultural production, forecasts. The El Niño-Southern Oscillation phenomenon (ENSO) is one of the princ...

Delineating the climate processes governing precipitation variability in drought-prone Texas is critical for predicting and mitigating climate change effects, and requires the reconstruction of past climate beyond the instrumental record. We synthesize existing paleoclimate proxy data and climate simulations to provide an overview of climate variability in Texas during the Holocene. Conditions ...

Recent climate reconstructions are analyzed specifically for insights into those patterns of climate variability in past centuries with greatest impact on the North American region. Regional variability, largely associated with the El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon, the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), and multidecadal patterns of natural variability, are found to mask the emergen...

The risk management paradigm has been proposed by a number of national and international research organisations as a useful framework for identifying robust decisions in the face of the inherent uncertainties associated with climate variability and anthropogenic climate change. The pursuance of risk management hinges on four fundamental considerations: a) a threshold for a particular system of ...

With increased understanding and realisation that climate variability exists at a number of timescales and that climate variability and climate change can impact greatly on any community (i.e., impose major drought periods as well as provide opportunities associated with more beneficial periods), it is not surprising that climate information and climate forecasts have proliferated over past dec...

The Pacific North American (PNA) teleconnection has a strong influence on North American climate. Instrumental records and century-scale reconstructions indicate an accelerating tendency towards the positive PNA state since the mid-1850s, but much less is known about long-term PNA variability. Here we reconstruct PNA-like climate variability during the mid- and late Holocene using paired oxygen...