Today, a new paper was published in Nature Climate Change , titled “Peak glacier extinction in the mid-twenty-first century” . I am a co-author of the study, which was led by Lander Van Tricht, who carried out the vast majority of the work. As a co-author, I stand behind the results presented in the paper. The study quantifies the number of inventorised glaciers that are projected to be lost under…
Image by Dall-E on a prompt by me. You have one week left before submitting your dissertation! Amidst the latent stress (hopefully not panic!), the last-minute readings and changes to your code and results, it’s easy to overlook a few fundamentals of dissertation writing. However, these fundamentals are crucial for the reader and, likely more important to you, the grading of your work. Here is a…
This morning I recycled an old presentation of mine to give an online seminar at the Austrian Society for Snow and Avalanches (short: ÖGSL ). In this presentation I talk about open source and open science in general, and how your scientific work can benefit from the tools and practices developed by the open-source software community over the years. The slides are available here , and here is a…
In a recent study, Zekollari et al. (2019) , computed the predicted volume change of all glaciers in the European Alps. We display these data in the interactive plot below. It shows the future evolution of Alpine glaciers’ volume under various emission scenarios, and for selected countries/regions. Glacier change is displayed in % of their estimated volume in 2017. When hovering with the mouse…
ERA5 is the latest evolution of atmospheric reanalysis products. It makes a huge step forward in terms of data quality and spatial resolution. Here is a map of the topography used by ERA5 (at 0.25°, approx 25km): Click on the images to navigate and zoom This level of detail is unprecedented for a dataset of this type: a perfect playground for endless data wrangling shenanigans! Today, we have a…
Atmospheric reanalysis products for the 20th century offer a promising alternative to station-based datasets like CRU . The most recent reanalysis project is the CERA-20C , a 10-member ensemble of atmosphere-ocean coupled climate reanalyses from ECMWF. It superseedes ERA-20C , which we quickly discarded from our list of candidates. In this post, we assess CERA-20C temperature variability in the…
I gave a talk at the “Advances in Glacier and Ice Cap Modelling” session at the IUGG General Assembly 2019 in Montreal, CA. It was a solicited contribution, so I decided to talk about something less… conventional than I would normally do at a scientific conference. Download the slides : pdf Preparing the talk was very challenging for me, because I was going to talk to an audience of glaciologists.…
A guest post by Lindsey Nicholson . Last week we were happy to host the 23rd Alpine Glaciology Meeting at the University of Innsbruck. The meeting was generously sponsored by the University of Innsbruck and the Faculty of Geo- and Atmospheric sciences. We had two days of glaciological talks and poster presentations, plus a chance to meet and network with colleagues. The program can be accessed…
You may have encountered the “ Warming Stripes ” from Ed Hawkins , a beautiful and brilliantly simple visualization of global warming. I like the purity of the charts, which comes from the absence of labels or scales. However, this leaves the reader with unanswered questions, such as “what is the range of the warming?” or “when did the warming become so obvious?” Therefore, I decided to reproduce…
Last week I had to prepare a presentation for an audience with no glaciological background. I wanted to explain some basic concepts of glaciology such as accumulation , ablation , equilibrium line altitude and mass movement in a glacier. Since I’m no good at drawing and I thought that such graphics might be useful for further occasions, I asked a professional graphic designer (who also happens to…
Last year I had the chance to work with two brilliant master students, Maria Siller and Miriam Schlumpberger. They wrote about the topic of wet and dry spells in the Tropical Andes of Peru, from two different perspectives: synoptic climatology and high resolution atmospheric modelling. Together their work form a nice story and I decided to present it at the EGU conference this year. Here is what…
TL;DR Since this blog post is now one of the top web search results for “WRF projection”, I thought it’d be good to summarize the most important points. Here they are: all you need to know about the WRF projection parameters is found in the WRF netcdf file output you can plot WRF output with python very easily thanks to the WRF-Python or salem packages if you need to parse the projection…
Last week I joined the glaciology field course organised by my friend and colleague Stephan at the Langenferner glacier. There were 8 students from ACINN and 4 from the geography department . The agenda for the week was quite intense since the field course also served another purpose: provide the last stake readings of the hydrological year 2017, which means that we had to read all the ablation…
Last summer my partner Conni and I spent three weeks in Iceland. One of our goals was to walk a trek we had read about on the Icelandic Guides portfolio . Apart from their succinct description of the guided tour we could find little information about the trail, the most comprehensive reports being that of Dieter Graser’s (in German) and David Abadie’s (in French) very useful websites. From their…
The latest release of the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) Fluctuations Of Glaciers (FoG) database ( WGMS, 2016 ) ships with a new lookup table, linking the glaciers in the WGMS database to those in the Randolph Glacier Inventory ( RGI , Version 5). The problem Let’s provide a little bit of context before going on. The RGI is the first and, as of today, the only global inventory of glacier…
I gave a couple of python workshops at the ACINN recently. It gave me a good excuse not to do what I should do right now, and try two fancy new tools instead: Reveal.js and RISE . Reveal.js Reveal.js is an open-source tool to create HTML presentations which will be displayed in an internet browser. This has a strong advantage: it is platform independent, and displayable on basically any computer…
In last weeks literature seminar we discussed a recent paper by D.S. Wilks: Wilks, D. S.: “The Stippling Shows Statistically Significant Grid Points”: How Research Results are Routinely Overstated and Overinterpreted, and What to Do about It, Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc., 97(12), 2263–2273, doi: 10.1175/BAMS-D-15-00267.1, 2016 In this paper he revisits an existing method (the “false discovery rate”,…
In a wonderfully ironic post (in French), the journalist Sylvestre Huet describes the life and career of Jean-Pierre Sauvage, who recently won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Jean-Pierre Sauvage studied chemistry in Strasbourg, wrote his PhD thesis in Strasbourg, after which he obtained a permanent position in… Strasbourg, where he stayed until his retirement in 2009. This is a disastrous career…
With the new semester approaching (way too fast), I have to think seriously about what to keep and what to change in the upcoming master level lecture “ Physics of the Climate System ”. To help me in this process I have the results of two “polls”: an official evaluation organised by the university (with very standard questions), and a less formal evaluation I prepared myself, containing questions…
Note 1: this post was originally published in March 2016 on the OGGM website. It is now reproduced here with a few small modifications. Note 2: in the meantime, the ITMIX group discussed the preliminary results at the EGU assembly in Vienna. It turns out that OGGM is doing quite a good job! More about this by the end of 2016. Note 3: the paper summarizing the experiment is online for review! Visit…