Occurrence of Magellanic penguins along the Northeast Brazilian coast during 2008 Austral winter.

During the austral winter of 2008, thousands of penguins traveled to low latitudes along the South Atlantic coast of South America. The atmospheric and oceanic conditions from April to July 2008 may account for the penguins' unusual geographic distribution. During that period, South Atlantic coastal waters were cooler; the wind anomalies had northward and onshore components; the ocean's coastal region presented northward currents that favored the penguins to travel toward lower latitudes. This anomalous climate regime resulted from extreme meteorological frontal systems that occurred mainly during June 2008. Three consecutive extreme midlatitude cyclones produced strong wind shear that resulted in the northward oceanic flow along the South American eastern shoreline favoring the penguins to be spotted in northern tropical waters.

Small is beautiful: climate-change science as if people mattered.

There is a widely accepted gap between the production and use of climate information. It is also widely accepted that at least part of the reason for this situation lies in the challenge of bridging between what may be characterized as ''top-down'' approaches to climate information on the global scale, and local decision contexts, which necessarily take a ''bottom-up'' perspective, in which climate change is just one factor among many to consider. We here reflect on the insights provided in a different context-that of economics-by E.F. Schumacher in his celebrated book Small is Beautiful (1973), to see what light they might shed on this challenge, with a focus on climate-change science for adaptation. Schumacher asked how economics might look if it was structured "as if people mattered". We ask the same question of climate-change science, and find many parallels. One is the need to grapple with the complexity of local situations, which can be addressed by expressing climate knowledge in a conditional form. A second is the importance of simplicity when dealing with deep uncertainty, which can be addressed through the use of physical climate storylines. A third is the need to empower local communities to make sense of their own situation, which can be addressed by developing ''intermediate technologies'' that build trust and transparency. Much of climate-change science is necessarily big science. We argue that in order to make climate information useable for adaptation, it is also necessary to discover the beauty of smallness.

Drivers and impacts of the most extreme marine heatwaves events.

Prolonged high-temperature extreme events in the ocean, marine heatwaves, can have severe and long-lasting impacts on marine ecosystems, fisheries and associated services. This study applies a marine heatwave framework to analyse a global sea surface temperature product and identify the most extreme events, based on their intensity, duration and spatial extent. Many of these events have yet to be described in terms of their physical attributes, generation mechanisms, or ecological impacts. Our synthesis identifies commonalities between marine heatwave characteristics and seasonality, links to the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, triggering processes and impacts on ocean productivity. The most intense events preferentially occur in summer, when climatological oceanic mixed layers are shallow and winds are weak, but at a time preceding climatological maximum sea surface temperatures. Most subtropical extreme marine heatwaves were triggered by persistent atmospheric high-pressure systems and anomalously weak wind speeds, associated with increased insolation, and reduced ocean heat losses. Furthermore, the most extreme events tended to coincide with reduced chlorophyll-a concentration at low and mid-latitudes. Understanding the importance of the oceanic background state, local and remote drivers and the ocean productivity response from past events are critical steps toward improving predictions of future marine heatwaves and their impacts.