Century-to-millennial scale fluctuations in precipitation and temperature are an established feature of European Holocene climates. Changes in moisture delivery are driven by complex interactions between ocean moisture sources and atmospheric circulation modes, making it difficult to resolve the drivers behind millennial scale variability in European precipitation. Here, we present two overlapp...

In this paper the effect of the synoptic scale variability is analyzed using a simple atmosphere-ocean coupled model. This high frequency variability has been taken into account in the model adding white gaussian noise in variables related to zonal and meridional temperature differences. Results show that synoptic scale frequency variability on longitudinal heating contrast between land and sea...

The impacts of global climate change on the Basque coast and the pelagic systems within the southeastern Bay of Biscay are reviewed. Climate projections under greenhouse gas emission scenarios indicate that this area will experience changes in climate throughout the 21st century, including warming of surface air (especially heat wave episodes), intensification of extreme daily rainfall (10%), w...

The second half of the 20th century showed a series of decadal-scale anomalies of salinity, temperature and sea ice cover in the northern North Atlantic. One pronounced event, the 'great salinity anomaly' (GSA) is observed in the late 1060s and the early 1970s (Dickson et al., 1988). This anomaly can be linked to the sea ice volume out of the Arctic through Fram Strait, which represents a major...

The extraction of climatic signals from time series of biogeochemical data is further complicated in estuarine regions because of the dynamic interaction of land, ocean, and atmosphere. We explored the behavior of potential global and regional climatic stressors to isolate specific shifts or trends, which could have a forcing role on the behavior of biogeochemical descriptors of water quality a...

Emerging problems of environmental change and of long range hydrologic forecasting demand knowledge of the hydrologic cycle at global rather than catchment scale. Changes in atmosphere and/or landscape characteristics modify the earth's metabolism through changes in its biogeochemical cycles. The most basic of these is the water cycle which directly affects the global circulation of both atmosp...

The coupled global atmosphere-ocean-vegetation model ECBilt-CLIO-VECODE is used to perform transient simulations of the last 9000 years, forced by variations in orbital parameters, atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations and total solar irradiance (TSI). The objective is to study the impact of decadal-to-centennial scale TSI variations on Holocene climate variability. The simulations show tha...

1 Introduction One of the principal roles of the ocean in the global heat balance is storage of heat, which moderates seasonal extremes and leads to the contrast between ocean and continent temperatures. In the global warming environment, the ocean could delay the onset of the atmospheric warming by absorbing some of the excess heat trapped in the atmosphere. Ocean modeling plays an important r...

A methodology is demonstrated to exploit the polarization sensitivity of high-resolution radar measurements to interpret and quantify upper ocean dynamics. This study particularly illustrates the potential of quad-polarization synthetic aperture radar (SAR) measurements. The analysis relies on essential characteristics of the electromagnetic scattering mechanisms and hydrodynamical principles. ...

Precipitation pulses are essential for the regeneration of drylands and have been shown to be related to oceanographic anomalies. However, whereas some studies report increased precipitation in drylands in northern Mexico during El Niño years, others report increased drought in the southern drylands. To elucidate the effect of oceanographic/atmospheric anomalies on moisture pulses along the who...