5 research outputs found
The impact of climate change on photovoltaic power generation in Europe
Ambitious climate change mitigation plans call for a significant increase in the use of renewables, which could, however, make the supply system more vulnerable to climate variability and changes. Here we evaluate climate change impacts on solar photovoltaic (PV) power in Europe using the recent EURO-CORDEX ensemble of high-resolution climate projections together with a PV power production model and assuming a well-developed European PV power fleet. Results indicate that the alteration of solar PV supply by the end of this century compared with the estimations made under current climate conditions should be in the range (-14%; +2%), with the largest decreases in Northern countries. Temporal stability of power generation does not appear as strongly affected in future climate scenarios either, even showing a slight positive trend in Southern countries. Therefore, despite small decreases in production expected in some parts of Europe, climate change is unlikely to threaten the European PV sector
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The curious nature of the hemispheric symmetry of the Earth’s water and energy balances
This paper presents new estimates of the hemispheric
energy balance based on an assembly of radiative flux
and ocean heat data. Further, it provides an overview of recent simulations with fully coupled climate models to investigate
the role of its representation in causing tropical precipitation
biases. The energy balance portrayed here features a small
hemispheric imbalance with slightly more energy being
absorbed by the Southern hemisphere. This yields a net transport
of heat towards the NH composing of a northward crossequatorial
heat transport by the oceans and a southward heat
flow in the atmosphere. The turbulent fluxes and hemispheric
precipitation balance to about 3 Wm−2 with slightly larger
total accumulation occurring in the NH. CloudSat data indicate
more frequent precipitation in the SH implying more
intense precipitation in the NH. Fully coupled climate model
simulations show that reducing hemispheric energy balance
biases does little to reduce existing biases in tropical
precipitation