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.
Launching uncrewed systems to monitor climate and ecosystem changes in the U.S. Arctic, sequencing the genome for endangered marine species, and improving weather forecasts with advances in regional models — these are just a few of NOAA’s scientific achievements in 2020. The newly released 2020 NOAA Science Report highlights the ways these accomplishments — and many more — provide the foundation for vital services that Americans use every day.
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.
For Sea Grant, resilience is more than a buzzword. Sea Grant is involved in every aspect of climate resilience planning, from start to finish.
As the planet warms, scientists expect that mountain snowpack should melt progressively earlier in the year - but that melt isn't evenly distribted from location to location.
The answer is important for understanding how the Earth system is responding to climate change.
November has jumped 2020 back on the “top three warmest” track becoming the second warmest November in the 141 year record, according to the latest monthly summary from the National Centers for Environmental Information.
A new, fine-scale modeling approach developed by NOAA and CIRES scientists now projects that there will still be enough high-elevation snow by the middle of the 21st Century to support - according to federal biologists - the denning habits of one iconic North American mountain-dweller, the wolverine.
Understanding the biologic contribution of CO2 to megacities' overall carbon emissions will be important for designing and evaluating mitigation strategies.