Climate Attribution

The Fire Weather Index has a quiet dependency that trips up almost everyone who tries to use it in a climate model. To do the arithmetic the way it was designed, you need the temperature, humidity,…

A heatwave is almost always reduced to a thermometer reading: a record broken, a threshold crossed, a number in the headline. But no single figure captures what a heatwave actually is: a whole…

The intuitive story about landslides is simple: more rain, more slides. A century of Calabrian records tells a more unsettling one. Working in the mountainous toe of the Italian peninsula, Stefano…

For a day and a half in February 2022, Storm Eunice tore across the British Isles, the Low Countries and northern Germany, driving a red weather warning, shuttering rail networks and leaving well…

Almost everyone who has bought a house near water has met the 100-year flood line. It shows up on insurance forms and zoning maps, a single crisp boundary that seems to promise certainty: inside, you…

By the end of 29 October 2024, a rain gauge in the small town of Turís, inland from Valencia, had recorded something almost no one in Europe had seen: 771 millimetres of rain in twenty-four hours.…

Ask a hydrologist what a "hundred-year" downpour looks like for a given town, and the honest answer is that they are guessing from thin evidence. A rain gauge that has been running for thirty years…

Most of the wheat that crosses an international border in a given year leaves one of about a dozen countries. Most of the nations that buy it order from several of those exporters at once, which…

For most of the second half of the twentieth century, Greenland did something the rest of the planet was not doing. It got colder. While global mean temperature climbed, the annual mean at the…

Haiyan is over. It came ashore in the Philippines in November 2013, and what it did there is a matter of record. But a storm that has finished happening can be made to happen again, which is the…

For most of the late summer of 2023, the North Sea sat under stubborn high pressure. Clear skies, weak winds, and a shallow mixed layer let heat pile up in the top few tens of meters of water and…