Regions of intensification of extreme snowfall under future warming

Due to climate change the frequency and character of precipitation are changing as the hydrological cycle intensifies. With regards to snowfall, global warming has two opposing influences; increasing humidity enables intense snowfall, whereas higher temperatures decrease the likelihood of snowfall. Here we show an intensification of extreme snowfall across large areas of the Northern Hemisphere under future warming. This is robust across an ensemble of global climate models when they are bias-corrected with observational data. While mean daily snowfall decreases, both the 99th and the 99.9th percentiles of daily snowfall increase in many regions in the next decades, especially for Northern America and Asia. Additionally, the average intensity of snowfall events exceeding these percentiles as experienced historically increases in many regions. This is likely to pose a challenge to municipalities in mid to high latitudes. Overall, extreme snowfall events are likely to become an increasingly important impact of climate change in the next decades, even if they will become rarer, but not necessarily less intense, in the second half of the century

Economic losses from hurricanes cannot be nationally offset under unabated warming

Tropical cyclones range among the costliest of all meteorological events worldwide and planetary scale warming provides more energy and moisture to these storms. Modelling the national and global economic repercussions of 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, we find a qualitative change in the global economic response in an increasingly warmer world. While the United States were able to balance regional production failures by the original 2017 hurricane, this option becomes less viable under future warming. In our simulations of over 7000 regional economic sectors with more than 1.8 million supply chain connections, the US are not able to offset the losses by use of national efforts with intensifying hurricanes under unabated warming. At a certain warming level other countries have to step in to supply the necessary goods for production, which gives US economic sectors a competitive disadvantage. In the highly localized mining and quarrying sector—which here also comprises the oil and gas production industry—this disadvantage emerges already with the original Hurricane Harvey and intensifies under warming. Eventually, also other regions reach their limit of what they can offset. While we chose the example of a specific hurricane impacting a specific region, the mechanism is likely applicable to other climate-related events in other regions and other sectors. It is thus likely that the regional economic sectors that are best adapted to climate change gain significant advantage over their competitors under future warming

Climate Impact Storylines for Assessing Socio-Economic Responses to Remote Events

Complex interactions involving climatic features, socio-economic vulnerability or responses, and long impact transmissions are associated with substantial uncertainty. Physical climate storylines are proposed as approach to explore complex impact transmission pathways and possible alternative unfolding of event cascades under future climate conditions. These storylines are particularly useful for climate risk assessment for complex domains, including event cascades crossing multiple disciplinary or geographical borders. For an effective role in climate risks assessments, practical guidelines are needed to consistently develop and interpret the storyline event analyses.This paper elaborates on the suitability of physical climate storyline approaches involving climate event induced shocks propagating into societal impacts. It proposes a set of common elements to construct the event storylines. In addition, criteria for their application for climate risk assessment are given, referring to the need for storylines to be physically plausible, relevant for the specific context, and risk-informative.Six examples of varying scope and complexity are presented, all involving the potential climate change impact on European socio-economic sectors induced by remote climate change features occurring far outside the geographical domain of the European mainland. The storyline examples illustrate the application of the proposed storyline components and evaluates the suitability criteria defined in this paper. It thereby contributes to the standardization of the design and application of event-based climate storyline approaches

Tweets - US Senators of 115th Congress until Sept 2018

Twitter Scrape on tweets of official US senator's Twitter accounts of the 115th Congress US115thcongress.tar.gz: The 115th Congress' members and their respective Twitter accounts have been compared with https://www.socialseer.com/resources/us-senator-twitter-accounts/ (accessed September 27, 2018). Two account names have been substituted: SenatorSanders --> SenSanders SenBennetCO --> SenatorBennet The tweets have been scraped in .json until February 11, 2019. The tweets' plain text has been rid of http links and concatenated per user until September 26, 2018 and saved in .txt format. and split into separate folders 'Republican', 'Democrat', and 'Independent'. NOTE that picture links have not been removed! (pic.*) The tweets have been scraped with the Python library: https://github.com/taspinar/twitterscraper scrape_US115thcongress_tweets.ipynb: iPython notebook that should exemplify the scraping process balanced_Democrats_Republicans: list of account names used for the results in the associated paper Decompression: tar -zxvf US115thcongress.tar.g

Wave-like global economic ripple response to Hurricane Sandy

Tropical cyclones range among the costliest disasters on Earth. Their economic repercussions along the supply and trade network also affect remote economies that are not directly affected. We here simulate possible global repercussions on consumption for the example case of Hurricane Sandy in the US (2012) using the shock-propagation model Acclimate . The modeled shock yields a global three-phase ripple: an initial production demand reduction and associated consumption price decrease, followed by a supply shortage with increasing prices, and finally a recovery phase. Regions with strong trade relations to the US experience strong magnitudes of the ripple. A dominating demand reduction or supply shortage leads to overall consumption gains or losses of a region, respectively. While finding these repercussions in historic data is challenging due to strong volatility of economic interactions, numerical models like ours can help to identify them by approaching the problem from an exploratory angle, isolating the effect of interest. For this, our model simulates the economic interactions of over 7000 regional economic sectors, interlinked through about 1.8 million trade relations. Under global warming, the wave-like structures of the economic response to major hurricanes like the one simulated here are likely to intensify and potentially overlap with other weather extremes

Climate impact storylines for assessing socio-economic responses to remote events

Quote: “What I hear, I forget. What I see, I remember. What I do, I understand.” (Xunzi, ∼300 BCE). Modelling complex interactions involving climatic features, socio-economic vulnerability or responses, and long impact transmissions is associated with substantial uncertainty. Physical climate storylines are proposed as an approach to explore complex impact transmission pathways and possible alternative unfoldings of event cascades under future climate conditions. These storylines are particularly useful for climate risk assessment for complex domains, including event cascades crossing multiple disciplinary or geographical borders. For an effective role in climate risks assessments, development guidelines are needed to consistently develop and interpret the storyline event analyses. This paper elaborates on the suitability of physical climate storyline approaches involving climate event induced shocks propagating into societal impacts. It proposes a set of common elements to construct the event storylines. In addition, criteria for their application for climate risk assessment are given, referring to the need for storylines to be physically plausible, relevant for the specific context, and risk-informative. Apart from an illustrative gallery of storyline examples found in literature, three examples of varying scope and complexity are presented in detail, all involving the potential impact on European socio-economic sectors induced by remote climate change features occurring far outside the geographical domain of the European mainland. The storyline examples illustrate the application of the proposed storyline components and evaluate the suitability of the criteria defined in this paper. It thereby contributes to a rigorous design and application of event-based climate storyline approaches.ISSN:2212-096

Climate impact storylines for assessing socio-economic responses to remote events

Quote: “What I hear, I forget. What I see, I remember. What I do, I understand.” (Xunzi, ∼300 BCE). Modelling complex interactions involving climatic features, socio-economic vulnerability or responses, and long impact transmissions is associated with substantial uncertainty. Physical climate storylines are proposed as an approach to explore complex impact transmission pathways and possible alternative unfoldings of event cascades under future climate conditions. These storylines are particularly useful for climate risk assessment for complex domains, including event cascades crossing multiple disciplinary or geographical borders. For an effective role in climate risks assessments, development guidelines are needed to consistently develop and interpret the storyline event analyses. This paper elaborates on the suitability of physical climate storyline approaches involving climate event induced shocks propagating into societal impacts. It proposes a set of common elements to construct the event storylines. In addition, criteria for their application for climate risk assessment are given, referring to the need for storylines to be physically plausible, relevant for the specific context, and risk-informative. Apart from an illustrative gallery of storyline examples found in literature, three examples of varying scope and complexity are presented in detail, all involving the potential impact on European socio-economic sectors induced by remote climate change features occurring far outside the geographical domain of the European mainland. The storyline examples illustrate the application of the proposed storyline components and evaluate the suitability of the criteria defined in this paper. It thereby contributes to a rigorous design and application of event-based climate storyline approaches