Future storm surge impacts on insurable losses for the North Sea region

The influence of climate change on storm surges including increased mean sea level change and the associated insurable losses are assessed for the North Sea basin. In doing so, the newly developed approach couples a dynamical storm surge model with a loss model. The key element of the approach is the generation of a probabilistic storm surge event set. Together with parametrizations of the inland propagation and the coastal protection failure probability this enables the estimation of annual expected losses. The sensitivity to the parametrizations is rather weak except when the assumption of high level of increased mean sea level change is made. Applying this approach to future scenarios shows a substantial increase of insurable losses with respect to the present day. Superimposing different mean sea level changes shows a nonlinear behavior at the country level, as the future storm surge changes are higher for Germany and Denmark. Thus, the study exhibits the necessity to assess the socio-economic impacts of coastal floods by combining the expected sea level rise with storm surge projections.

Cold surge episodes over southeastern Brazil - a potential vorticity perspective

Most intense cold surges and associated frost events in southern and southeastern Brazil are characterized by a large amplitude trough over South America extending toward tropical latitudes and a ridge to the west of it over the Pacific Ocean. In this study, potential vorticity (PV) streamers serve to examine the flow condition leading to cold surges. Case studies suggest that several PV anomalies are related to cold surge episodes: (1) the potential vorticity unit (2-PVU) isoline upstream of South America becomes progressively more distorted prior and during the cold surge episode, indicating a flow situation which is conducive for Rossby wave breaking and hence a flow which strongly deviates from zonality; (2) the initial stage of a cold surge episode is characterized by a northward bulging of high-PV air to the east of the Andes, resulting in a PV streamer whose northern end reaches Uruguay and southeastern Brazil; the strong PV gradient on its western flank constitutes a flow configuration that induces and maintains the transport of sub-Antarctic air toward the subtropics; (3) a distinct negative PV anomaly, a blocking, originates over the eastern South Pacific, upstream of the South America sector. A composite analysis of 27 cold surges is performed for stratospheric PV streamer frequency on several isentropic surfaces. It reveals that equatorward wave breaking over South America and the western South Atlantic represents an important potential component of the dynamics of intense cold surges. The indications are most pronounced around the isentropic levels of 320 K and immediately before the day with largest temperature drops over subtropical Brazil.

“Crye Fredome”? Medievalism and Twenty-First-Century Scottish National Identity

It is a well-documented fact that the Middle Ages have had a long history of instrumentalisation by nationalisms. 19th-century Eu¬rope in particular witnessed an origins craze during the process of nation-building. In the post-Shoah, post-modern West, on the other hand, we might expect this kind of medievalist master nar¬rative to have been consigned to the dustbin of history. And yet, as nationalism surges again in Europe, negotiations of national identi¬ties in medieval dress seem to have become fashionable once more. In order to come to terms with the fragmented and often contradictory presence of the Middle Ages in these discourses of national identity, I propose we consider medievalism a utilitarian product of the cultural memory. Rather than representing any ‘real’ Middle Ages, then, medievalism tailors available knowledge of the medieval past to the diverse social needs and ideologies of the present. This paper looks at a selection of Scottish examples of present-day medievalism in an attempt to investigate, in particular, the place of the medieval Wars of Scottish Independence in contemporary negotiations of ‘Scottishness’. Both the relationships envisioned between self and other and the role played by ‘the land’ in these cultural, social and political instances of national introspection offer starting points for critical inquiry. Moreover, the analysis of a scholarly intervention in the run-up to the 2014 Scottish independence referendum indicates an intriguing dialogue of academic and non-academic voices in the context of Scottish medievalist cultural memory. We thus find a wide array of uses of the Scottish Middle Ages, some of which feed into the burgeoning nationalism of recent years, while others offer more pensive and ambivalent answers to the question of what it means to be Scottish in the 21st century.