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Michael Blanc

Publications and source records attributed to Michael Blanc.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

European supercell thunderstorms -- an underestimated current threat and an increasing future hazard

Supercell thunderstorms are the most hazardous thunderstorm category and particularly impactful to society. Their monitoring is challenging and often confined to the radar networks of single countries. By exploiting kilometer-scale climate simulations, a first-of-its-kind characterization of supercell occurrence in Europe is derived for the current and a warmer climate. Despite previous notions of supercells being uncommon in Europe, the model shows ~700 supercells per convective season. Occurrence peaks are co-located with complex topography e.g. the Alps. The absolute frequency maximum lies along the southern Alps with minima over the oceans and flat areas. Contrasting a current-climate simulation with a pseudo-global-warming +3$^\circ$C global warming scenario, the future climate simulation shows an average increase of supercell occurrence by 11 %. However, there is a spatial dipole of change with strong increases in supercell frequencies in central and eastern Europe and a decrease in frequency over the Iberian Peninsula and southwestern France.

physics.ao-ph

Quadrupolar power radiation by a binary system in a hyperbolic encounter on de Sitter background

The present cosmological model and the surveys favor the universe with a small but positive cosmological constant $\Lambda$, which accounts for dark energy and causes an exponential expansion. This can have observational consequences in the current detection of gravitational waves, as most of the waveforms for gravitational radiation are computed assuming a flat (Minkowski) background. In this work, we compute gravitational radiation within the quadrupole approximation on positive $\Lambda$ (de Sitter) background for a binary system interacting gravitationally through a hyperbolic encounter. We quantify the influence of the cosmological constant on the radiated energy as small corrections to the leading order Minkowski background results. The first order de Sitter background correction is of the order $\sqrt{\Lambda}$, and is thus extremely small. Therefore, the cosmological constant influence on the gravitational radiation is negligible and may not be detected with the existing or planned gravitational wave detectors.

gr-qc