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.
At the end of October, a small team of NOAA experts traveled to Glasgow, Scotland to attend the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26), an international summit aimed at accelerating climate action across the globe.
NOAA and the Climate Resilience Fund (CRF) announced on October 22, 2021, the results of its 2021 competitive grants program supporting projects that will help U.S. communities build resilience to the impacts of climate change.
A new NOAA-led study of precipitation high in the Colorado Rockies aims to give water managers better forecasts for runoff in the critically important Colorado River Basin.
NOAA and partner research on clouds and air-sea interactions will help improve a new generation of models that predict our weather and climate, according to a new summary article that is part of a special issue of the open access journal Earth System Science Data.
“I wanted to do something related to the environment,” Naik said. “It became clear to me during my studies that pollutants are not just harmful for human health, but they also impact the climate.”
A new study by Princeton University and NOAA researchers has found clear evidence of human influence on Earth’s climate in the past two decades of satellite measurements. “Human activity strongly influenced the positive trend in Earth's energy imbalance, causing a significant increase in the heat stored in the planet,” said Shiv Priyam Raghuraman, the lead researcher on the study.
If the preliminary results are correct, they mean that the heat wave would have been at least 150 times rarer before global warming.
New results from a nine-year research project in the eastern Amazon rainforest finds that significant deforestation in eastern and southeastern Brazil turned what was once a forest that absorbed carbon dioxide into a source of planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions.