Spectacular footage from inside a hurricane; a major ocean mapping milestone; new insights on the continued impacts of climate change, and much more -- 2021 was a busy year for NOAA Research. As the year draws to a close, we’re taking a look back at a few of our biggest research stories of the last 12 months.
Now in its fifth year, this forecast model has turned out to serve additional purposes that NOAA’s scientists hadn’t even considered – including maintaining sustainable fisheries and solving a smelly mystery!
From warmer ocean temperatures to longer and more intense droughts and heat waves, climate change is affecting our entire planet. Scientists at NOAA have long worked to track, understand and predict how climate change is progressing and impacting ecosystems, communities and economies.
Climate change is causing significant impacts on the Great Lakes and the surrounding region. As the largest surface freshwater system in the world, the Great Lakes have an enormous impact, seen and unseen, on the more than 34 million people who live within their collective basin. Because of their unique response to environmental conditions, Earth’s large lakes are considered by scientists as key sentinels of climate change. A long-term study published in Nature Communications today from NOAA reveals a warming trend in deepwater temperatures that foreshadows profound ecological change on the horizon. While less visible than the loss in ice cover and increasing lake surface temperatures, this latest index of climate change adds to the growing evidence of climate change impacts in the region.
From its inception as an experiment to improve forecasts for aviation, to its transition of its final update to NOAA National Weather Service operations, the Global Systems Laboratory’s pioneering High-Resolution Rapid Refresh weather model established a remarkable resume of research accomplishments.
Using a new powerful NOAA global climate model, NOAA and partner researchers show that big storm-induced spikes in sea levels will increase in the future from the Gulf Coast to the Atlantic coast as warming progresses, but will be driven by differing forces.
Two underwater robots will be gliding throughout the western Lake Erie basin this week, as NOAA and its partners at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) test technology to autonomously monitor and measure the toxicity of harmful algal blooms in the Great Lakes.
In the Great Lakes, summer means the arrival of sun, warmth and time spent enjoying the outdoors. Unfortunately, it also often means the arrival of harmful algal blooms.
Several Great Lakes are expected to reach record high water levels in the next six months, thanks to above average precipitation in the watershed and large amounts of runoff this year.