State of the Climate in 2017

his week NOAA released the State of the Climate Report 2017, where they stated that 2017 was one of the warmest years with a record high sea level. Worldwide the report received a lot of media attention, including the Guardian and der Spiegel.

Our team contributed to this report with a global soil moisture study led by prof. dr. Wouter Dorigo of TU Wien. This study was done with the ESA CCI Soil Moisture dataset and revealed the spatial extent and severity of several drought conditions in Africa, which lead to a displacement of more than 1 million people according to the World Meteorological Organization. In the US the impact of Hurricane Harvey was clearly visible, making southern and eastern US much wetter than normal.

The report can be found here (and our contributions on soil moisture are found on page S2,S6 and S35).