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About Rasmus Benestad

I am a senior scientist working at the Norwegian Meteorological Institute with a background from physics. My scientific career started with a degree in Physics with Electronics at UMIST in Manchester (UK), cloud micro-physics at New Mexico Tech (USA), and ocean physics at Atmospheric Oceanic and Planetary Physics (AOPP) at Oxford University (UK). Since then, I have also got heavily involved in the field of statistics, thanks to exciting collaborations with several statisticians.

My primary focus at the Norwegian Meteorological Institute has been towards climate change adaptation, empirical-statistical downscaling and anthropogenic climate change, but I have also worked on problems relating to natural climate variations connected to changes in the sun. I have authored two text books on these topics: Solar Activity and Earth's climate (Praxis/Springer) and Empirical-Statistical Downscaling (World Scientific Publishers).

My experience from the climate science community includes several roles: a contributing author on two past IPCC assessment reports, a person of contact (POC) for World Climate Research Programme's (WCRP) CORDEX project, a coordinating lead author on Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme's (AMAP) report Adapting Actions in a Changing Arctic (AACA, 2017), a councilor for the European Meteorological society (EMS), a member of the EMS communication and media committee, and part of the advisory board for Oxford Research Encyclopedia on climate. I also chair the professional network within the Norwegian trade union for engineer and natural scientists Tekna Klima, dealing with a diverse range of climate solutions.

Let’s check your temperature

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The underlying mission of my job is to safeguard lives and property through climate change adaptation based on science. In other words, to help society to prepare itself for risks connected with more extreme rainfall and temperatures.

For many people, “climate” may seem to be an abstract concept. I have had many conversations about climate, and then realised that people often have different interpretations. In my mind, climate is the same as weather statistics (which I realise can be quite abstract to many).

To avoid miscommunication, I want to make sure that we are on the same page when I discuss climate. Maybe it helps if I talk about more familiar and specific aspects, such as the temperature, rainfall, snow, or wind?

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Climate without Borders: putting changing climate into a new perspective

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Guest post by Mike Favetta

The goal of “Climate without Borders” (CwB) is to unite TV weather presenters from all over the world and bring scientific knowledge to a broader public. This, in turn, creates climate awareness and creates support for the urgent climate action needed. Although the name suggests a kind of connection with Doctors without Borders, members of Climate without Borders won’t be traveling to island nations about to be submerged, like Tuvalu, or areas sub and physically volunteering in the refugee efforts. Rather, Climate without Borders is a network of TV weathercasters around the world who aim to communicate the science, and impact of climate change, and give warnings to their local viewing populations. This makes the organization unique in the world. TV weathercasters are trusted sources of information, and they know the nuances of their audience’s cultures to make messages more understandable. Exploiting this relationship is an effective way of sharing climate information that people will listen to and comprehend.

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European climate services take an important leap forward 

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An important milestone was passed during the second general assembly of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, which took place in Berlin on Sept 24-28 (twitter hashtag '#C3SGA18'). The European climate service has become operational, hosted by the European Centre for Medium-Range Forecasts (ECMWF).


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A report from the European Meteorological Society’s annual meeting 2018

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If you want to make a difference as a scientist, you need to make sure that people understand the importance of your work. Conferences give you one opportunity to explain what you’ve found out.

I sometimes wonder if the value of attending conferences is sufficiently appreciated. You can save time getting an overview over your field of research and catch up on the latest developments, which would take many weeks just from reading papers (and it gets harder these days to find the time reading papers).

Another benefit is being able to meet colleagues and discuss the latest findings and your results. In addition to sharing your thoughts, you represent your institution and enhance its visibility. Organisations pay a lot of money for increased visibility. 

This week, I have listened to many good and interesting talks at the European Meteorological Society’s (EMS) annual meeting in Budapest (#emsannual2018), a meeting place for weather and climate experts across Europe and the rest of the world.

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Climate indicators

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The climate system is complex, and a complete description of its state would require huge amounts of data. However, it is possible to keep track of its conditions through summary statistics.

There are some nice resources which give an overview of a number for climate indicators. Some examples include NASA and The Climate Reality Project.

The most common indicator is the atmospheric background CO2 concentration, the global mean temperature, the global mean sea level, and the area with snow or Arctic sea ice. Other indicators include rainfall statistics, drought indices, or other hydrological aspects. The EPA provides some examples.   

One challenge has been that the state of the hydrological cycle is not as easily summarised by one single index in the same way as the global mean temperature or the global mean sea level height. However, Giorgi et al. (2011) suggested a measure of hydro-climatic intensity (HY-INT) which is an integrated metric that captures the precipitation intensity as well as dry spell length.  

There are also global datasets of indices representing the more extreme aspects of climate called CLIMDEX, providing a list of 27 core climate extremes indices (so-called the ‘ETCCDI’ indices, referring to the ‘CCl/CLIVAR/JCOMM Expert Team on Climate Change Detection and Indices’).

In addition, there is a website hosted by the NOAA that presents various U.S. Climate Extremes Index (CEI) in an interactive way.

So there are quite a few indicators for various aspects of the climate. One question we should ask, however, is whether they capture all the important and relevant aspects of the climate. I think that they don’t, and that there are still some gaps.

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References

  1. F. Giorgi, E. Im, E. Coppola, N.S. Diffenbaugh, X.J. Gao, L. Mariotti, and Y. Shi, "Higher Hydroclimatic Intensity with Global Warming", Journal of Climate, vol. 24, pp. 5309-5324, 2011. http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/2011JCLI3979.1

The claim of reduced uncertainty for equilibrium climate sensitivity is premature

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A recent story in the Guardian claims that new calculations reduce the uncertainty associated with a global warming:

A revised calculation of how greenhouse gases drive up the planet’s temperature reduces the range of possible end-of-century outcomes by more than half, …

It was based on a study recently published in Nature (Cox et al. 2018), however, I think its conclusions are premature.

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References

  1. P.M. Cox, C. Huntingford, and M.S. Williamson, "Emergent constraint on equilibrium climate sensitivity from global temperature variability", Nature, vol. 553, pp. 319-322, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature25450

A brief review of rainfall statistics

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There have been a number of studies which show that we can expect more extreme rainfall with a global warming (e.g. Donat et al., 2016). Hence, there is a need to increase our resilience to more rainfall in the future.

We can say something about how the rainfall statistics will be affected by a global warming, even when the weather itself is unpredictable beyond a few days.

Statistics is remarkably predictable for a large number of events where each of them is completely random (welcome to thermodynamics and quantum physics).

The normal distribution has often been used to describe the statistical character of daily temperature, but it is completely unsuitable for 24-hr precipitation. Instead, the gamma distribution has been a popular choice for describing rainfall.

I wonder, however, if there is an even better way to quantify rainfall statistics.

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References

  1. M.G. Donat, A.L. Lowry, L.V. Alexander, P.A. O’Gorman, and N. Maher, "More extreme precipitation in the world’s dry and wet regions", Nature Climate Change, vol. 6, pp. 508-513, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2941

Impressions from the European Meteorological Society’s annual meeting in Dublin 

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The 2017 annual assembly of the European Meteorological Society (EMS) had a new set-up with a plenary keynote each morning. I though some of these keynotes were very interesting. There was a talk by Florence Rabier from the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), who presented the story of ensemble forecasting. Keith Seitter, the executive director of the American Meteorological Society (AMS), talked about the engagement with the society on the Wednesday.

The Helix at DCU was the main venue of #EMS2017

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Why extremes are expected to change with a global warming

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Joanna Walters links extreme weather events with climate change in a recent article in the Guardian, however, some  reservations have been expressed about such links in past discussions.

For example, we discussed the connection between single storms and global warming in the post Hurricanes and Global Warming – Is there a connection?, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has issued a statement, and Mike has recently explained the connection in the Guardian.

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