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Identifying Key Driving Processes of Major Recent Heat Waves
(2019)Journal of Geophysical Research: AtmospheresHeat waves lead to major impacts on human health, food production, and ecosystems. To assess their predictability and how they are projected to change under global warming, it is crucial to improve our understanding of the underlying processes affecting their occurrence and intensity under present‐day climate conditions. Beside greenhouse gas forcing, processes in the different components of the climate system—in particular the land ...Journal Article -
Soil Moisture Effects on Afternoon Precipitation Occurrence in Current Climate Models
(2019)Geophysical Research LettersSoil moisture‐precipitation feedbacks in a large ensemble of global climate model simulations are evaluated. A set of three metrics are used to assess the sensitivity of afternoon rainfall occurrence to morning soil moisture in terms of their spatial, temporal, and heterogeneity characteristics. Positive (negative) spatial feedback indicates that the afternoon rainfall occurs more frequently over wetter (drier) land surface than its ...Journal Article -
Concurrent 2018 Hot Extremes Across Northern Hemisphere Due to Human-Induced Climate Change
(2019)Earth's FutureExtremely high temperatures pose an immediate threat to humans and ecosystems. In recent years, many regions on land and in the ocean experienced heat waves with devastating impacts that would have been highly unlikely without human‐induced climate change. Impacts are particularly severe when heat waves occur in regions with high exposure of people or crops. The recent 2018 spring‐to‐summer season was characterized by several major heat ...Journal Article -
Observed Trends in Global Indicators of Mean and Extreme Streamflow
(2019)Geophysical Research LettersThis study investigates global changes in indicators of mean and extreme streamflow. The assessment is based on the Global Streamflow Indices and Metadata archive and focuses on time series of the annual minimum, the 10th, 50th, and 90th percentiles, the annual mean, and the annual maximum of daily streamflow. Trends are estimated using the Sen‐Theil slope, and the significance of mean regional trends is established through bootstrapping. ...Journal Article -
Observational Constraints Reduce Likelihood of Extreme Changes in Multidecadal Land Water Availability
(2019)Geophysical Research LettersFuture changes in multidecadal mean water availability, represented as the difference between precipitation and evapotranspiration, remain highly uncertain in ensemble simulations of climate models. Here we identify a physically meaningful relationship between present‐day mean precipitation and projected changes in water availability. This suggests that the uncertainty can be reduced by conditioning the ensemble on observed precipitation, ...Journal Article -
Importance of Framing for Extreme Event Attribution: The Role of Spatial and Temporal Scales
(2019)Earth's FutureEvent attribution, which determines how anthropogenic climate change has affected the likelihood of certain types of extreme events, is of broad interest to industries, governments, and the public. Attribution results can be highly dependent on the definition of the event and the characteristics assessed, which are part of framing the attribution question. Despite a widely acknowledged sensitivity to framing, little work has been done to ...Journal Article -
Disappearing World Heritage Glaciers as a Keystone of Nature Conservation in a Changing Climate
(2019)Earth's FutureSince 1972, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Convention aims to identify and protect sites of Outstanding Universal Value for future generations. However, growing impacts of climate change are of the utmost concern for the integrity of many sites. Here, we inventory the glaciers present in natural World Heritage sites for the first time. We found 19,000 glaciers in 46 sites located ...Journal Article -
Fire tests on glued-laminated timber beams with specific local material properties
(2019)Fire Safety JournalJournal Article -
Building resilient renewable power generation portfolios: The impact of diversification on investors’ risk and return
(2019)Applied EnergyJournal Article -
Pervasive decreases in living vegetation carbon turnover time across forest climate zones
(2019)Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of AmericaForests play a major role in the global carbon cycle. Previous studies on the capacity of forests to sequester atmospheric CO2 have mostly focused on carbon uptake, but the roles of carbon turnover time and its spatiotemporal changes remain poorly understood. Here, we used long-term inventory data (1955 to 2018) from 695 mature forest plots to quantify temporal trends in living vegetation carbon turnover time across tropical, temperate, ...Journal Article