1st place in the HGF scientific image contest!

In this years Scientific image contest 2022 held by Helmholtz Imaging of the Helmholtz Association one of our nextGEMS members Nikolay Koldunov from AWI won the 1st place for his contribution „Europe in winds“!

The image shows wind gusts over Europe as simulated by the nextGEMS climate model IFS with a 4km spatial resolution in the atmosphere. Wind gusts are overlayed by the zonal wind component for shading, which is plotted in gray-scale and made transparent. There is no explicit plotting of land, the high resolution allows for the land to „shine through“ due to larger surface friction and hence smaller wind speeds. The darker the area the smaller the wind is.

This particular image has several interesting features:
(i) a long stretch (hundreds of kilometers) of relatively calm winds in the wake of Jan Meyen island,
(ii) atmospheric fronts stretching for thousands of kilometers across the North Atlantic Ocean, and
(iii) strong winds in the Adriatic including a Bora event.

Visualisations like this will help scientists to identify and analyse interesting weather events, including extreme events, extract corresponding information from the modelling system and develop better understanding of Earth’s weather and climate.

If you have further questions about this image, feel free to contact Nikolay.