The Climate Dynamics Group has two new members:

• Fangyuan Cheng, PhD student
• Xinyu Yang, postdoc

They will both work with research related to climate variability & change, extreme events, and socioeconomic impacts. See their member pages for more information.

Warmly welcome!

2025 has been a busy year with not much time to write news for the website. Here’s a summary of some new publications that haven’t been mentioned here yet, including two led by Ziqian Zhong:

Arctic climate system:

• Ye et al. (2025): Attributing climate and weather extremes to Northern Hemisphere sea ice and terrestrial snow: progress, challenges and ways forward
• Liu et al. (2025): Changes in atmospheric circulation amplify extreme snowfall fueled by Arctic sea ice loss over high-latitude land

Carbon cycle dynamics:

• Peng et al. (2025): Characterizing spatial variability of soil organic carbon through improved machine-learning modeling with in situ data resampling: A case study in Alaska
• Zhong et al. (2025): Contrasting vegetation productivity responses in arid and humid zones to recent changes in diurnal temperature range

Wildfire:

• Chen et al. (2025): Divergent radiative forcing of fine-mode aerosols across tree genera during wildfires in North America and Europe
• Xu et al. (2025): The critical role of snowmelt onset-driven vapor pressure deficit variations in wildfire dynamics of northern latitudes

Climate variability & change:

• Zou et al. (2025): Amplified urban heat island effect in southern China’s old towns following atmospheric regulation policies
• Zhong et al. (2025): Sub-diurnal asymmetric warming has amplified atmospheric dryness since the 1980s

Hans Chen is a co-author on a new paper published in Science Advances. This study applies the emergent constraint method to constrain projected Arctic warming and wetting based on historical global warming trend and climatological Arctic sea ice concentration.

• Cai et al. (2025): Lessened projections of Arctic warming and wetting after correcting for model errors in global warming and sea ice cover

Hans Chen has been interviewed by Källkritikbyrån about the recent wildfires in California and the links to climate change and increasing “hydroclimate whiplash”:

• Svampeffekter och whiplash – så påverkar klimatförändring bränder (Swedish)

A recent paper co-authored by Hans Chen is featured on the cover of the relatively new open-access journal The Innovation. The paper, led by Cheng Shen, investigates the effect of strong tropical volcanic eruptions on near-surface wind speed globally.

• Shen et al. (2025): A robust reduction in near-surface wind speed after volcanic eruptions: Implications for wind energy generation.

Update 2025-02-06: The Guardian has reported on the study:

• Weatherwatch: volcanic eruptions pose challenge for wind energy, says study

Hari Nair recently joined our group as a postdoc. Hari will primarily work on a project exploring the changing carbon cycle dynamics in the Arctic climate system, financed by the Hasselblad Foundation.

Happy 2025! We close out 2024 on a high note with some new exciting research:

Machine learning and aerosols:

• Yan et al. (2024): Deep learning with pretrained framework unleashes the power of satellite-based global fine-mode aerosol retrieval.
• Yan et al. (2024): Substantial underestimation of fine-mode aerosol loading from wildfires and its radiative effects in current satellite-based retrievals over the United States.

Carbon cycle and ecosystem dynamics:

• Xu et al. (2024): Global patterns and drivers of post-fire vegetation productivity recovery.
• Li et al. (2024): Increasing sensitivity of tree radial growth to precipitation.

Hans Chen will give the opening talk at Stora Hållbarhetsdagen Göteborg (“The Big Sustainability Day Gothenburg”) about the current climate situation. The event is arranged by Fastighetssverige.

Date: 21 November 2024
Location: Clarion Hotel Draken
More information: https://fastighetssverige.se/stora_hallbarhetsdagen_goteborg

We have recently published a paper that investigates how global Köppen–Geiger climate zones are projected to shift under 4×CO₂, with a special focus on the effect of vegetation physiological changes, which have been largely neglected so far. You can find the paper in Science of The Total Environment:

• He et al. (2024): Vegetation increases global climate vulnerability risk by shifting climate zones in response to rising atmospheric CO₂.