Climate sciences articles from across Nature Portfolio

The jet stream — a band of strong winds high above Earth’s surface — can shift and create opposing summertime climate conditions in northwest and southeast Europe. Tree-ring data reveal that the jet stream has driven this climate dipole for more than 700 years, resulting in contrasting patterns in weather, agricultural and societal extremes.

Climate influences when leaves change colour and fall, but not all trees lose their leaves at the same time. Combining field data, mathematical models and remote sensing, researchers show how local-scale variation in tree canopies and understory temperatures alters the start and duration of autumn leaf colouration and forecast reduced autumn delays under climate change.

Considerable uncertainties surround whether and how Earth could bounce back from a transgression of the temperature limits agreed in Paris. An analysis of overconfidence in models suggests that it might be safer to avoid such a path.

Global biases in chlorophyll-a data from fluorescence measurements can vary tenfold seasonally, according to analysis of data from biogeochemical profiling floats and ocean colour satellites.

With climate change, mesoscale eddies are increasing in importance as drivers of subsurface extreme marine heatwaves and cold spells that do not correlate with surface events, with implications for severe impacts on marine biodiversity and ecosystem functioning and services.

Methyl bromide (CH₃Br) is an important ozone-depleting substance whose use is regulated under the Montreal Protocol. However, the spatial-temporal patterns of China’s national CH₃Br emissions remain unclear. Here, the authors find that China’s top-down emission estimates exceed bottom-up estimates by 60%.

The jet stream — a band of strong winds high above Earth’s surface — can shift and create opposing summertime climate conditions in northwest and southeast Europe. Tree-ring data reveal that the jet stream has driven this climate dipole for more than 700 years, resulting in contrasting patterns in weather, agricultural and societal extremes.

Climate influences when leaves change colour and fall, but not all trees lose their leaves at the same time. Combining field data, mathematical models and remote sensing, researchers show how local-scale variation in tree canopies and understory temperatures alters the start and duration of autumn leaf colouration and forecast reduced autumn delays under climate change.

Many climate scenarios bake in a temperature overshoot before technologies are used to scrub the atmosphere clean of emissions. Emerging science says that is probably a fool’s errand.

Considerable uncertainties surround whether and how Earth could bounce back from a transgression of the temperature limits agreed in Paris. An analysis of overconfidence in models suggests that it might be safer to avoid such a path.

A surging market for ‘fish maw’ is pushing threatened species to the brink. Researchers are trying to limit the damage.

Nature Geoscience spoke with Dr Mariana Clare, a machine learning scientist at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts; Prof. Haifeng Qian, an environmental scientist at Zhejiang University of Technology; and Dr Theresa Sawi, a seismologist at the US Geological Survey, about using artificial intelligence (AI) in their research and in geoscience generally.