The impact factor of 14.5 of the journal “Nature Climate Change” classes it first in the “Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences” category. Christophe CASSOU, CNRS researcher at CERFACS, published in this journal, in collaboration with a CNRS researcher at Météo-France, an article that is already very noticed by the climate science community. In this paper, the authors develop a new criterion for defining the starting date of the seasons in Western Europe, based solely on the dynamics of the atmosphere. This very specific criterion allows to assess that human activities, via greenhouse gases and aerosols emissions, are responsible for an about ten day earlier onset of the summer season in the 2000s compared to the 1960s, and that this advance would reach twenty days in 2100 when the most emitting greenhouse gas scenario, that is the “business as usual” one (RCP 8.5), was followed. The work is based on analysis of observations as well as the results of numerical simulations with the coupled model CNRM-CM5 that has been developed by teams from Météo-France and CERFACS, and was widely referenced in the last IPCC report published in 2013-2014.
Link to the articleon the Nature Climate Change journal site:
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate2969.html
