Sample sizes of observed climate extremes are typically too small to reliably constrain return period estimates when there is non-stationary behaviour. To increase the historical record 100-fold, we apply the UNprecedented Simulated Extreme ENsemble (UNSEEN) approach, by pooling ensemble members and lead times from the ECMWF seasonal prediction system SEAS5. We fit the GEV distribution to the UNSEEN ensemble with a time covariate to facilitate detection of changes in 100-year precipitation values over a period of 35 years (1981–2015). Applying UNSEEN trends to 3-day precipitation extremes over Western Norway substantially reduces uncertainties compared to estimates based on the observed record and returns no significant linear trend over time. For Svalbard, UNSEEN trends suggests there is a significant rise in precipitation extremes, such that the 100-year event estimated in 1981 occurs with a return period of around 40 years in 2015. We propose a suite of methods to evaluate UNSEEN and highlight paths for further developing UNSEEN trends to investigate non-stationarities in climate extremes.

There is a wide consensus within the polar science, meteorology, and oceanography communities that more in situ observations of the ocean, atmosphere, and sea ice are required to further improve operational forecasting model skills. Traditionally, the volume of such measurements has been limited by the high cost of commercially available instruments. An increasingly attractive solution to this cost issue is to use instruments produced in-house from open-source hardware, firmware, and postprocessing building blocks. In the present work, we release the next iteration of our open-source drifter and wave-monitoring instrument, which follows these solution aspects. The new design is significantly less expensive (typically by a factor of 5 compared with our previous, already cost-effective instrument), much easier to build and assemble for people without specific microelectronics and programming competence, more easily extendable and customizable, and two orders of magnitude more power-efficient (to the point where solar panels are no longer needed even for long-term deployments). Improving performance and reducing noise levels and costs compared with our previous generation of instruments is possible in large part thanks to progress from the electronics component industry. As a result, we believe that this will allow scientists in geosciences to increase by an order of magnitude the amount of in situ data they can collect under a constant instrumentation budget. In the following, we offer (1) a detailed overview of our hardware and software solution, (2) in situ validation and benchmarking of our instrument, (3) a fully open-source release of both hardware and software blueprints. We hope that this work, and the associated open-source release, will be a milestone that will allow our scientific fields to transition towards open-source, community-driven instrumentation. We believe that this could have a considerable impact on many fields by making in situ instrumentation at least an order of magnitude less expensive and more customizable than it has been for the last 50 years, marking the start of a new paradigm in oceanography and polar science, where instrumentation is an inexpensive commodity and in situ data are easier and less expensive to collect.

Despite the vast literature on heavy‐precipitation events in South Asia, synoptic conditions and moisture sources related to extreme precipitation in Nepal have not been addressed systematically. We investigate two types of synoptic conditions—low‐pressure systems and midlevel troughs—and moisture sources related to extreme precipitation events. To account for the high spatial variability in rainfall, we cluster station‐based daily precipitation measurements resulting in three well‐separated geographic regions: west, central, and east Nepal. For each region, composite analysis of extreme events shows that atmospheric circulation is directed against the Himalayas during an extreme event. The direction of the flow is regulated by midtropospheric troughs and low‐pressure systems traveling toward the respective region. Extreme precipitation events feature anomalous high abundance of total column moisture. Quantitative Lagrangian moisture source diagnostic reveals that the largest direct contribution stems from land (approximately 75%), where, in particular, over the Indo‐Gangetic Plain moisture uptake was increased. Precipitation events occurring in this region before the extreme event likely provided additional moisture.

As atmospheric models move to higher resolution and resolve smaller scales, the maximum modeled wind speed also tends to increase. Wave models tuned to coarser wind fields tend to overestimate the wave growth under strong winds. A recently developed semiempirical parameterization of the Charnock parameter, which controls the roughness length over surface waves, substantially reduces the aerodynamic drag of waves in high winds (above a threshold of 30 m s⁻¹). Here, we apply the formulation in a recent version of the wave model WAM (Cycle 4.7), which uses a modified version of the physics parameterizations by Ardhuin et al. (2010, https://doi.org/10.1175/2010jpo4324.1) as well as subgrid obstructions for better performance around complex topography. The new Charnock formulation is tested with wind forcing from NORA3, a recently completed nonhydrostatic atmospheric downscaling of the global reanalysis ERA5 for the North Sea, the Norwegian Sea and the Barents Sea. Such high‐resolution atmospheric model integrations tend to have stronger (and more realistic) upper‐percentile winds than what is typically found in coarser atmospheric models. A 2‐year comparison (2011–2012) of a control run against the run with the modified Charnock parameter shows a dramatic reduction of the wave height bias in high‐wind cases. The added computational cost of the new physics and the reduction of the Charnock parameter compared to the earlier WAM physics is modest (14%). A longer (1998–2020) hindcast integration with the new Charnock parameter is found to compare well against in situ and altimeter wave measurements both for intermediate and high sea states.

This study focuses on the analysis of the extreme precipitation event in Central Nepal on 19 July 2007 which was part of a sequence of rain events leading to the devastating South Asia flood of 2007. We investigate synoptic‐scale conditions using reanalyses and attribute moisture sources with a Lagrangian moisture source diagnostic. Further, we characterize the mesoscale precipitation event with a high‐resolution numerical simulation. The simulation reveals an intense wide convective event with a simulated 40 dBZ echo core of considerable horizontal extent (1,550 km ²) exceeding a height of 12 km. Initially small convective cells were invigorated by high CAPE and a potentially unstable layer at mid‐tropospheric levels. This layer reached conditional instability adding latent energy to the system. Isolated convective cells organized upscale into a wide intense convective system, fuelled with moist low‐level inflow. The result was torrential rain with over 250 mm within 24 hr. Several synoptic‐scale conditions contributed to the intense development: (a) supply of moist air with the help of a typical monsoon break condition flow pattern, (b) anomalously significant moisture sources along this path due to prior precipitation events, (c) an upper‐tropospheric trough orienting the atmospheric flow against the Himalayas with associated quasi‐geostrophic forcing creating a favourable environment for convection, and (d) destabilized stratification due to an upslope flow. This analysis encompasses multiple scales and shows how a wide intense convective system, not unusual for this region, can be intensified by distinct synoptic constituents.