NOAA Research News

Rising temperatures will tend to reduce the amount of water in many of Colorado’s streams and rivers, melt mountain snowpack earlier in the spring, and increase the water needed by thirsty crops and cities, according to the new report, “Climate Change in Colorado: A Synthesis to Support Water Resources Management and Adaptation,” which updates and expands upon an initial report released in 2008.

The growth of wind-generated power in the United States  is creating greater demand for improved wind forecasts. To address this need, the Department of Energy is working with NOAA and industry on the Wind Forecast Improvement Project, funded and led by DOE.

More than 200 national and international lightning experts are gathering this week in Norman, Oklahoma, for what organizers have called “the most important international conference on atmospheric electricity in the world.”  Held every four years, the 2014 International Conference on Atmospheric Electricity is co-hosted by NOAA’s National Severe Storms Laboratory and the University of Oklahoma’s College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences, and features the latest research on lightning and other electrical phenomena in the atmosphere.

Over the past 30 years, the location where tropical cyclones reach maximum intensity has been shifting toward the poles in both the northern and southern hemispheres at a rate of about 35 miles, or one-half a degree of latitude, per decade according to a new study, The Poleward Migration of the Location of Tropical Cyclone Maximum Intensity, published tomorrow in Nature.

On April 22, 2014, the U.S. Postal Service is celebrating Earth Day by unveiling a new Forever international rate stamp inspired by a simulation of sea surface temperatures from a NOAA model of the Earth’s climate. The round stamp depicts the globe with North America in the center, surrounded by vivid bands of blue, green and red, signifying the varying temperatures of sea surface waters.

Later this year, NOAA’s National Weather Service will usher into daily operations a sophisticated model called the High-Resolution Rapid Refresh, or HRRR, that will update forecasts hourly over the entire lower 48 United States at extremely sharp resolution using the latest observations from a network of ground and satellite-based sensors, radars and aircraft.

The HRRR provides forecast information at a resolution four times finer than what is currently used in hourly updated NOAA models.  This improvement in resolution from 13 to three kilometers is like giving forecasters an aerial photograph in which each pixel represents a neighborhood instead of a city.