NOAA Research News

New NOAA research demonstrates that drones and weather balloons can gather data needed to improve weather forecasts in severe working environments. 

Summer is finally here, and that means families all over the country are starting to fire up the barbecue grill and open up their beach chairs. But summertime also means hot weather — sometimes dangerously hot.

A team of 20 NOAA scientists are in Goa, India, to meet with 200 of India’s leading ocean, atmosphere and fisheries scientists to mark a decade of productive collaboration on ocean and atmospheric observations, with life-saving economic benefits for both nations. The NOAA and Indian scientists will also board NOAA Ship Ronald H. Brown to launch new observational buoys in the Indian Ocean to improve the vitally important Indian Ocean observing system of buoys, a key tool for India and the United States to forecast everything from monsoons to severe weather in the United States.

People have become familiar with “bomb cyclones” this winter, as several powerful winter storms brought strong winds and heavy precipitation to the U.S. east coast, knocking out power and causing flooding.

Meteorologists can tell you whether it will storm 10 days before your wedding, and climatologists can determine if you’re likely to have a hot and dry summer almost a year in advance. But the time period in between, known as the subseasonal to seasonal (S2S) timescale, has remained a major weather-climate prediction gap despite growing public demand.

A new analysis of heat wave patterns appearing today in Nature Climate Change concludes that climate change driven by the buildup of human-caused greenhouse gases will overtake natural variability as the main cause of heat waves in the western United States by the late 2020s and by the mid-2030s in the Great Lakes region.