Atmospheric Sciences

Social fairness key to success of the EU’s new ETS2 cap and trade system The introduction of the EU’s second ‘cap and trade’ emissions trading system (ETS2) for the road transport and buildings sectors will help spur Europe’s decarbonisation ambitions, accelerating the shi...

‘The ETS2, aims to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fuel combustion in buildings, road transport and other sectors like small industry not covered by the existing EU Emissions Trading System (ETS1).’ www.eea.europa.eu/en/newsroom/...

Daily sea surface temperature for 3rd of March 2026 over the French coastal areas

For those who don’t know, marine heatwaves don’t just happen in summer, they can occur in winter too…
And what a winter it has been for French coastal waters. Let’s hope the water cools down before summer

I want to repeat comments I already made on this plot since some news outlets seem to ignore them: Hubble will not reenter until early 2030s. The curve here is alarming, but will flatten out as we hit solar minimum in the coming years. I still think it's time for NASA to take action on a reboost.

We've been seeing a lot of old Soviet Tselina-D/Ikar sigint satellites reenter lately. 68 were launched from 1970 to 1992.
The plot shows their orbital altitude vs time, with approximate dates of solar maxima overlaid in red. You can see how reentry dates are grouped near the maxima.

A prolonged time with weak zonal winds at high altitudes expected after today’s SSW, converging to the climatological mean charts.ecmwf.int/permalinks/m...

… and it works quite well at those! The code and underlying training set are open source and available for the community to reproduce our results and improve upon them. A web-based version is also available here ➡️ simulator.reflective.org Lots of potential future improvements already planned.

A Climate Intervention Dynamical Emulator (CIDER) for scenario space exploration Abstract. Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI) is a form of proposed climate intervention to reflect incoming solar radiation, offsetting some of the impacts of greenhouse gas warming. Due to the cha...

gmd.copernicus.org/articles/19/...

We’ve been working for a few years now on a regional emulator capable of exploring different SRM strategies, capable of expanding the exploration space beyond the small set that Earth System models can provide. It’s here now! Presenting CIDER ➡️

Carbon dioxide overload, detected in human blood, suggests a potentially toxic atmosphere within 50 years - Air Quality, Atmosphere & Health Air Quality, Atmosphere & Health - Anthropogenic activities are increasing the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. There is mounting experimental evidence that lifetime exposure...

‘The increase identified by Zheutlin et al. (2014) has continued. The most recent serum HCO3− levels measured was 25.3mEq/L (in 2019–2020), representing a ~ 7% increase from 1999.’ link.springer.com/article/10.1...

De Noordzee warmt op, maar niet overal en niet in elk seizoen even snel Elk jaar is de Noordzee rond deze tijd het koudst. Maar tegenwoordig koelt het zeewater minder sterk af dan vroeger. In de afgelopen 40 jaar is de Noordzee ongeveer 1,7 graad warmer geworden. Die opwa

Elk jaar is de Noordzee rond deze tijd het koudst. Maar tegenwoordig koelt het zeewater minder sterk af dan vroeger.

In one of his last posts in september 2021 Geert Jan van Oldenborgh expressed his trust in the young generation to rise to the challenge of the energy transition and that it will be hard work. It will even harder in the US than could be imagined at that time. The trust remains.

AGU Denounces Trump Administration’s Repeal of the EPA Endangerment Finding In 1856, American scientist Eunice Foote made history by publishing the first academic paper demonstrating that carbon dioxide traps heat from the Sun, a discovery that laid the foundation for climate...

Scientific integrity: AGU Denounces Trump Administration’s Repeal of the EPA Endangerment Finding

NASA greenlights two earth science missions, to researchers’ relief Orbiting satellites will monitor changes in the stratosphere and on the planet’s surface

The new satellite mission STRIVE will look through the limb of the atmosphere, in the infrared, to take vertical profiles (~5-50 km) of temperature and composition throughout the upper troposphere and stratosphere from 2030 onwards. Very good news.

A new and better way to keep tabs on El Niño and La Niña » Yale Climate Connections Developed in response to a warming world, NOAA’s revised scale more precisely identifies which episodes are likely to have the biggest impacts.

In ‘Defining El Niño indices in a warming climate’ Geert Jan van Oldenborgh (Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute) et al., 2021 noted that the 2016-17 La Niña event had more intense effects than expected. With increased attention and lead time, greater and earlier action could have been taken.

Two big updates in the ocean temperature world:

1) The determination of the phase of ENSO ( #ElNiño, #LaNiña) will operationally transition to the RELATIVE Oceanic Niño Index ( #RONI) on February 1:
www.weather.gov/media/notifi...
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T2m weekly anomaly N Hemisphere

Minus 10 to plus 10

Warm Arctic, cold continents, www.euronews.com/green/2026/0...

A tale of two press releases. One says the jet stream is slowing down, the other says it is speeding up. How can they both be right? In fact, as I explained in this talk at the Andorra Weather Meeting, there is no contradiction. The jet stream is changing in different ways at different altitudes.

New in JGR: Atmospheres The GOES Eastern United States Fire Emissions Inventory By Fite et al 2025

In JGR: Atmospheres, scientists present the GOES Eastern U.S. Fire Emissions (GEUFE, pronounced “goofy”) inventory, which improves fire detection using frequent observations from the GOES-16 satellite.🛰️

🔗 Check out the #OpenAccess article: buff.ly/muRiMkS

#AGUPubs #Wildfire #ClimateChange

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You’re invited! Join the 9th CAMS Policy User Workshop in Budapest on 4–5 March 2026 hosted by HungaroMet and organised with the 2026 FAIRMODE plenary.

How climate breakdown is putting the world’s food in peril - in maps and charts www.theguardian.com/environment/...

An update of the Global Hydrogen Budget.

The biggest source of H2 into the atmosphere is oxidation of CH4 and NMVOCs. So if you care about the climate effects of H2, reduce your CH4 emissions...

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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A cold spell in Europe until the end of the year. The episode is not likely to grow in strength and duration. Weather in Scandinavia seems to remain quite mild this month. Sustained cold weather in central Europe would need a very cold region from where cold air could be advected.

Zonal mean winds at 10 hPa level are gaining more strengths towards above average levels at the start of 2026. No signs of SSWs within the coming weeks.

I have a new update to climate model-observation comparisons over at The Climate Brink, covering CMIP3, CMIP5, and CMIP6. Models perform well globally. The latest generation shows too much long-term warming but better reproduces recent trends: www.theclimatebrink....

This is a legitimate scientific revolution in meteorology.

Also, to be clear, these models are not the AI LLMs that most people are familiar with. They are machine learning algorithms trained on observations (actually reanalysis).

UK ‘not in favor’ of dimming the sun
https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-not-in-favor-of-dimming-the-sun-but-willing-to-debate-regulation/
Government says it opposes the cutting-edge and controversial climate tech, but is willing to debate its regulation.

We don't need "regulation", just an out […]

Latest ECMWF forecast of the zonal mean zonal wind at the 10 hPa level, picking up in strength, and reestablishing to normal polar vortex wind speeds within the coming week

Incredible footage of volcanic eruption of a dormant volcano in Ethiopia from a commercial plane.

A sight seen for the first time in recorded history. ⌚

‘Policy decisions must grapple with normative questions such as how much certainty about the formation and climate impact of contrails is required to take action, and how short-lived, uncertain effects like contrail cirrus should be weighed against the long-term certainty of CO2 impacts.’

‘Weather forecasting methods for contrail cirrus forming regions need to be improved so that high-impact flights—that is, flights that cause substantial amounts of persistent contrails—can better be predicted.’

Contrails, Aviation, and Climate Change Contrails, Aviation, and Climate Change

Contrails act like short-lived climate forcers. Here was the 1-2% estimate recently (re-)stated: www.rff.org/publications...