Arctic Ocean
Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,342
Could Ukraine hold a presidential election right now? Will Europe use frozen Russian assets to fund war? How can Ukraine rebuild China ties? 'Ukraine is running out of men, money and time' Russian attacks on Ukraine's southern Zaporizhia killed a 44-year-old man and wounded several others, Governor Ivan Fedorov said on Monday, as the death toll from other assaults on Sunday continued to rise. Ukrainian officials said the attacks on Sunday killed two people in the eastern Donetsk region and a 69-year-old man in the northern Sumy region.
Score-based generative emulation of impact-relevant Earth system model outputs
Bouabid, Shahine, Souza, Andre Nogueira, Ferrari, Raffaele
Policy targets evolve faster than the Couple Model Intercomparison Project cycles, complicating adaptation and mitigation planning that must often contend with outdated projections. Climate model output emulators address this gap by offering inexpensive surrogates that can rapidly explore alternative futures while staying close to Earth System Model (ESM) behavior. We focus on emulators designed to provide inputs to impact models. Using monthly ESM fields of near-surface temperature, precipitation, relative humidity, and wind speed, we show that deep generative models have the potential to model jointly the distribution of variables relevant for impacts. The specific model we propose uses score-based diffusion on a spherical mesh and runs on a single mid-range graphical processing unit. We introduce a thorough suite of diagnostics to compare emulator outputs with their parent ESMs, including their probability densities, cross-variable correlations, time of emergence, or tail behavior. We evaluate performance across three distinct ESMs in both pre-industrial and forced regimes. The results show that the emulator produces distributions that closely match the ESM outputs and captures key forced responses. They also reveal important failure cases, notably for variables with a strong regime shift in the seasonal cycle. Although not a perfect match to the ESM, the inaccuracies of the emulator are small relative to the scale of internal variability in ESM projections. We therefore argue that it shows potential to be useful in supporting impact assessment. We discuss priorities for future development toward daily resolution, finer spatial scales, and bias-aware training. Code is made available at https://github.com/shahineb/climemu.
Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,300
Is Chicago the violent crime capital of the US? How did India-US relations decline so fast? A Ukrainian drone attack killed two women in the village of Golovchino in Russia's Belgorod region, Russia's state TASS news agency reports. A man who was seriously injured in a Ukrainian drone attack in Russia's Belgorod region in April has died in hospital, TASS reports. TASS also reported that Russian forces shot down 82 Ukrainian drones in a 24-hour period.
Russia Tests Hypersonic Missile at NATO's Doorstep--and Shares the Video
Russian military exercises near NATO borders follow the recent incursion of Russian drones into the airspace of Poland and Romania, further stoking tensions with the West. On Sunday, Russia released images of its launch of a 3M22 Zircon hypersonic missile from a frigate in the Barents Sea, in the Arctic Ocean, near NATO borders. The launch comes against a backdrop of rising tensions with the West, just days after several Russian drones violated the airspace of North Atlantic Treaty Organization member countries Poland and Romania. The Zircon test is part of the Zapad 2025 joint maneuvers with Belarus, a week of military exercises aimed at assessing defensive and coordination capabilities between the two allied countries. It also serves to show that Russia's military force has not lost its strength, despite heavy losses more than three years after the start of the invasion of Ukraine .
Ukraine targets key Russian oil refinery as Moscow tests hypersonic missile
How is Russia replenishing its military? What is a'coalition of the willing'? How China forgot promises and'debts' to Ukraine How are Europe, the US pulling apart on Ukraine? Russia and Ukraine have been engaging in major aerial battles, targeting energy and transportation infrastructure, as Moscow presses its fierce ground assault in the Ukrainian east in the war's fourth year and tests a type of hypersonic weapon. Russia's Ministry of Defence announced on Sunday that its air defences shot down 361 drones, four guided aerial bombs, and rockets from a US-made high mobility artillery rocket system (HIMARS) overnight.
Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,298
How is Russia replenishing its military? What is a'coalition of the willing'? How China forgot promises and'debts' to Ukraine How are Europe, the US pulling apart on Ukraine? NATO fighter jets headed to eastern Europe under new'Eastern Sentry' Russian attacks on Ukraine killed at least three people in the Donetsk region and another in Kharkiv, the Kyiv Independent reported on Saturday, citing local officials. A drone breached Romanian airspace during a Russian attack on Ukrainian infrastructure, prompting Romania to scramble fighter jets, the country's defence minister, Ionut Mosteanu, said.
Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,250
Russian forces attacked Ukraine's capital, Kyiv, early on Monday, wounding five people and damaging a residential building, according to the head of the city's military administration, Tymur Tkachenko. A Russian drone hit a Ukrainian bus carrying 39 evacuees in the eastern Sumy region, near Ukraine's border with Russia, on Sunday, killing three people and wounding 19 others, according to the regional governor. Two others were killed in a landmine explosion in Sumy's Esman community on Saturday, while two more were killed in Russian attacks on the front-line Donetsk region, according to officials, taking the death toll from attacks across Ukraine on that day to at least six. Ukraine's forces also launched drone attacks at Russia on Sunday, with the governor of the Leningrad region reporting that at least 10 Ukrainian unmanned aircraft were downed over the areas surrounding the city of St Petersburg. Falling debris injured a woman, Governor Alexander Drozdenko said.
IceBench: A Benchmark for Deep Learning based Sea Ice Type Classification
Taleghan, Samira Alkaee, Barrett, Andrew P., Meier, Walter N., Banaei-Kashani, Farnoush
Sea ice plays a critical role in the global climate system and maritime operations, making timely and accurate classification essential. However, traditional manual methods are time-consuming, costly, and have inherent biases. Automating sea ice type classification addresses these challenges by enabling faster, more consistent, and scalable analysis. While both traditional and deep learning approaches have been explored, deep learning models offer a promising direction for improving efficiency and consistency in sea ice classification. However, the absence of a standardized benchmark and comparative study prevents a clear consensus on the best-performing models. To bridge this gap, we introduce \textit{IceBench}, a comprehensive benchmarking framework for sea ice type classification. Our key contributions are threefold: First, we establish the IceBench benchmarking framework which leverages the existing AI4Arctic Sea Ice Challenge dataset as a standardized dataset, incorporates a comprehensive set of evaluation metrics, and includes representative models from the entire spectrum of sea ice type classification methods categorized in two distinct groups, namely, pixel-based classification methods and patch-based classification methods. IceBench is open-source and allows for convenient integration and evaluation of other sea ice type classification methods; hence, facilitating comparative evaluation of new methods and improving reproducibility in the field. Second, we conduct an in-depth comparative study on representative models to assess their strengths and limitations, providing insights for both practitioners and researchers. Third, we leverage IceBench for systematic experiments addressing key research questions on model transferability across seasons (time) and locations (space), data downscaling, and preprocessing strategies.