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.

Submit your piece of art showing any aspect of working with high-resolution earth system model simulations now!

When starting to work with the nextGEMS simulation output, you will certainly produce new and exiting figures. We would ask you to think about them also in a different way: even if it doesn’t show what you intended, does it look like it could hang in a museum? Like a piece of modern art? Maybe only a couple of tweaks are necessary.

If you would like to contribute to this project, please send an email to Yuting before November 7. Please add a short title and describe in one or two sentences the scientific context of your simulation. The plot shall not show any axes, labels, legends, but give more a focus on the artistic value.