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Category: climatology – Page 3

New Models Show How Solar ‘Tornadoes’ Could Wreak Havoc on Earth

Weather forecasting is a powerful tool. During hurricane season, for instance, meteorologists create computer simulations to forecast how these destructive storms form and where they might travel, which helps prevent damage to coastal communities.

When you’re trying to forecast space weather, rather than storms on Earth, creating these simulations gets a little more complex.

To simulate space weather, you would need to fit the Sun, the planets, and the vast empty space between them in a virtual environment, also known as a simulation box, where all the calculations would take place.

Antarctic Ocean of the last ice age reveals how a critical process of CO₂ storage may slow again

Off the coast of Antarctica, the sea ice retreated toward the southernmost continent and, like a bottle cap taken off a soda bottle, that reduced pressure slowed down a process of critical carbon dioxide capture, dramatically accelerating the warming of the planet.

But all that happened thousands of years ago, one of the death knells of the last ice age.

And yet, the sea ice of our own age is also retreating, so it’s critical that we understand these oceanic processes that have such a profound effect on the globe.

Climate-smart housing design helps cities beat the heat

Painting walls in light colors, insulating roofs, choosing medium-sized windows, and aligning buildings to the sun’s path may seem like simple choices. But they could provide powerful defenses against climate change for millions of people in the world’s most vulnerable regions.

That’s the message of a study, appearing in the journal Energy and Buildings, which identifies low-cost, climate-smart design strategies as crucial for future housing in Latin America’s rapidly warming cities.

Researchers used computer simulations to test how various climate-resilient building projects would perform under current and projected climate conditions in five major cities—Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, in Brazil, Santiago (Chile), Bogotá (Colombia), and Lima (Peru).

Four central climate components are losing stability, says study

Four of the most important interconnected parts of the Earth’s climate system are losing stability, according to a review article based on observational data published in Nature Geoscience. The researchers succeeded in highlighting the warning signals for destabilization of the Greenland Ice Sheet, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the Amazon rainforest, and the South American monsoon system.

Lightning strikes 12 times per minute on fusion engineering test platform

Zap Energy has advanced its Century fusion engineering test platform to operate for more than one hundred plasma shots at 0.2 Hz, or one shot every five seconds, with the resulting heat captured by surfaces coated with circulating liquid metal.

Concentrated inside a about the size of a hot water heater, each plasma carried up to 500 kA of current—about 20 times stronger than a bolt of lightning—discharged into a vessel lined with flowing liquid bismuth. During the record run, Century’s total input power was 57 kilowatts, with 39 kilowatts delivered directly to the cables leading to the .

Compared with Century’s commissioning milestone in 2024, this achievement represents an increase of 20 times in sustained average power and is a major step toward developing commercial power plants using repetitive pulsed power and .

Agrivoltaics: Electricity and Agriculture

Agrivoltaics describes a process for the simultaneous use of agricultural land for food production and PV power generation. The technology enables the efficient dual use of agricultural land: photovoltaics on open spaces can be substantially expanded without significantly using up valuable resources of fertile arable land. Targeted light management optimizes the yields from PV and photosynthesis. In addition, value creation in the region and rural development are promoted, as agrivoltaic projects are ideally suited to be supported in a decentralized by farmers, municipalities and small and medium-sized enterprises. This results in new, economically viable farming options for agriculture.

We are working on the implementation and further development of agrivoltaics in industrial and research projects.

Opportunities in Agrivoltaics.

Agrivoltaics offers great opportunities for agriculture and climate protection. In their foreword, the two Federal Ministers Anja Karliczek and Julia Klöckner support the promising concept of combining agricultural production and renewable electricity generation on the same land.

The guideline provides information on the possibilities and advantages of agrivoltaics, offers an overview of its potential and the current state of technology, and presents practical advice for agriculture businesses, municipalities and companies.

Aside from more efficient land use, agrivoltaics can help reduce water consumption in agriculture, generate stable additional sources of income for farms, and make many farms more resilient against harvest losses. The early involvement of local citizens is a key criterion for success in the concrete implementation of agrivoltaics. https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/publications/studies/agrivo…ition.html

Continue reading “Agrivoltaics: Electricity and Agriculture” | >

Satellites Detect Mysterious Changes in the Earth’s Core

A team of scientists has detected a colossal geological anomaly, a massive and mysterious change that took place nearly 2,900 kilometers deep, right at the boundary between the Earth’s mantle and the core, an event that measurably altered the planet’s gravitational field and that has been captured, indirectly but unequivocally, by instruments in orbit.

The finding, published last month in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, suggests that the structure of rocks in the depths of the lower mantle can transform dynamically, a process that could have fundamental implications for our understanding of planetary dynamics, from the origin of major earthquakes to the generation of the magnetic field that protects life on the surface.

The research, led by Charlotte Gaugne Gouranton of the City University of Paris and with the notable participation of geophysicist Isabelle Panet of Gustave Eiffel University, focused on the meticulous analysis of data collected by the GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) satellite mission, a joint project between the United States and Germany that operated between 2002 and 2017.

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