Storm Surges: Phenomena, Forecasting and Scenarios of Change

AbstractStorm surges are behind the geophysical risk of short term and abrupt inundating low-lying coastal regions known along most coasts of the world. They are related to meteorological phenomena, mostly wind storms. Storm surges represent a challenge for science and risk management with respect to short term forecasts of specific events but also with long-term changes of the statistics of storm surges due to anthropogenic global climate change, sinking coasts and estuarine water works. Storm surges are expected to become more severe in the coming decades and centuries because of ongoing and expected accelerated mean sea level, and much less so because of more energetic wind storms

From Decoding Turbulence to Unveiling the Fingerprint of Climate Change

This open access book serves as a reference for the key elements and their significance of Klaus Hasselmann's work on climate science and on ocean wave research, all based on a rigorous and deeply physical thinking. It summarizes the original articles (mostly from the 1970 and 1980s; some of which are hard to find nowadays) and brings them in a present-day context. From 1975 until 2000, he was (founding) Director of the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology, which he made to one of the world-leading academic institutions. He first made the issue of anthropogenic climate change accessible to analysis and prediction and later transformed climate science into a significant factor in forming public policy. The book is written by co-workers and colleagues of Klaus Hasselmann, who—many under his immediate supervision—joined him in this effort. With this background, they present the key achievements and assess the significance of these for the present state of knowledge and scientific practice

Utility of Coastal Science

Keynote Lecture

Is greenhouse gas forcing a plausible explanation for the observed warming in the Baltic Sea catchment area?

We investigated whether anthropogenic forcing is a plausible explanation for the observed warming in the Baltic Sea catchment area. Therefore, we compared the most recent trends in the surface temperature over land with anthropogenic climate change projections from regional climate model simulations. We analyzed patterns of change with different spatio-temporal resolutions. The observed annual area-mean change in the daily-mean temperature was consistent with the anthropogenic climate change signal. This finding was robust to the removal of the signal of the North Atlantic Oscillation. In contrast to the annual area-mean change, we found little consistency in both annual cycle and spatial variability of the observed and projected changes

The History of Ideas of Downscaling—From Synoptic Dynamics and Spatial Interpolation

The history of ideas, which lead to the now matured concept of empirical downscaling, with various technical procedures, is rooted in two concepts, that of synoptic climatology and that of spatial interpolation in a phase space. In the former case, the basic idea is to estimate from a synoptic weather map the regional details, and to assemble these details into a regional climatology. In the other approach, a shortcut is made, in that samples of (monthly, seasonal, or annual) large-scale dynamical statistics (i.e., climate) are linked to a sample of local statistics of some variables of interest