The term ‘new normal’ is defined and applied to 2015 record-breaking temperatures. A new normal can be useful for understanding and communicating extremes in a changing climate when precisely defined.

Original Source

The climate of the past millennium provides a baseline for understanding the background of natural climate variability upon which current anthropogenic changes are superimposed. As this period also contains high data density from proxy sources (e.g. ice cores, stalagmites, corals, tree rings, and sediments), it provides a unique opportunity for understanding both global and regional-scale climate responses to natural forcing.

Tropical cyclones are used as travelling thermometers to globally sample upper-tropospheric temperatures and help mitigate uncertainties due to discrepancies among different reanalysis data products.

Flash floods on the edge of high terrain, such as the Himalayas or Rocky Mountains, are especially dangerous and hard to predict. The Leh flood of 2010 at the edge of the Himalayan Plateau in India is an example of the tragic consequences of such storms. The flood occurred over a high mountain river valley when, on three successive days, diurnally generated convective cells over the Tibetan Plateau gathered into mesoscale convective systems and moved off the edge of the Plateau over Leh.

The contributions in this article examining some of the specific extreme weather or climate events of 2011 demonstrate the importance of understanding the interplay of natural climate variability and anthropogenic climate change on their occurrence.

In this paper, a review on worldwide literature on trends in tropical cyclone frequency, intensity, and impact, with special reference to the North Indian Ocean Basin, that is, the Bay of Bengal and Arabian Sea.