Extreme heat wave Australia adds new colour to weather chart – forecast up to 54 degrees Celsius!

As red tones cannot get much darker when you approach black, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology had to resort to introducing new colours on their weather forecast maps for next week, when inland temperatures in South Australia can locally reach a staggering 54 degrees Celsius.

heat wave Australia extreme weather forecast
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Both historical and 60-year trend show Dutch winters are warming – these graphs tell you how, why – and what to expect

Falling snow flakes are humbling. Not just because of their beauty, but also because of their gentle ability to completely paralyse a developed and overpopulated country with traffic jams, clogged railroad switches and closed runways.

But although that (together with a repeatedly forecasted but ever-postponed ‘horror winter’) may make for a great annual media hype, it does not imply winters are getting colder. To the contrary – winter warming in the Netherlands* is increasing – but it’s not as simple as a ‘local seasonal case’ of global climate warming.

[*) Here we use the Netherlands as case study, but the general climate analysis and the shown seasonal trends go for Northwest Europe (in which the Netherlands lie central) as a whole, including winter development for Great Britain, Ireland, Belgium, Germany, France, Denmark and (southern) Norway & Sweden.]

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60-year trend shows tropical trade winds weakening in Pacific too – ENSO inclination towards El Niño state

trade winds El NiñoIt is a question that has puzzled climate scientists for a long time:

Under global climate warming, how will the El Niño/La Niña Southern Oscillation (ENSO) respond?

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Superscale volcanic eruptions can disappoint as climate coolers, Pleistocene record shows

Yes, during ice ages it can be a bit chilly. That’s why stuff that happened in the Pleistocene is easily linked to climate cooling. Like asteroids falling from the sky. Or volcanoes erupting.

supervolcano sulphate bipolar seesaw
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Alpine meadows and subalpine meadows – equally beautiful and equally threatened by decreasing snowcover

Do you like to go for a hike in the mountains on a sunny summer day? Do you then enjoy stepping out of the forest into one of those flowery meadows?

In many cases this would not be an actual alpine meadow [situated above the tree line] but a so-called subalpine meadow, formed in a local microclimate and microenvironment and therefore just as natural as alpine meadows – and perhaps even more important for ecological diversity.

alpine and subalpine mountain meadows
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