Major hurricanes, intense wildfires, increasing concentrations of greenhouse gasses, deep sea discoveries, and more made 2022 an eventful year for NOAA Research. As we enter the final days of the year, we’re taking a look back at some of our biggest accomplishments from the last 12 months.
Large wildfires and severe heat events are happening more often at the same time, worsening air pollution across the western United States, according to a new study led by Washington State University, with CIRES and NOAA’s Global Systems Laboratory.
New research from NOAA finds that fragrant personal care products - the stuff that makes you smell good - are now responsible for a significant amount of the ozone pollution known as smog that plagues major urban areas.
The giant methane cloud spotted by satellite over the U.S. Southwest that made national headlines in 2014 wasn’t a persistent, undiscovered “hotspot” as first thought, but the result of a nightly atmospheric condition and topography that trapped industrial and natural emissions of the potent greenhouse gas near the ground in the basin overnight, according to new research published in the journal Elementa by CIRES and NOAA.
Running on the newest version of NOAA’s Global Forecast System, or GFS, the FV3-Chem model forecasts the distribution of some primary air pollutants: smoke, soot, organic carbon, sulfate, and large and small particles of dust and sea salt - collectively known as aerosols. Because these aerosols affect the weather, the model also provides weather forecasts.
NOAA has launched a wide-ranging research effort to investigate the impact of reduced vehicle traffic, air travel, shipping, manufacturing and other activities on Earth’s atmosphere and oceans due to the response to COVID-19.
A new NOAA and University of Michigan study using an instrumented airplane has found unexpectedly large emissions over five major cities along the East Coast - twice the total amount of methane and almost 10 times the amount estimated from natural gas.
New research finds the temperature of a wildfire is a better predictor of what’s in the smoke than the type of fuel being burned - a surprising result that will advance a wildfire smoke-modeling tool currently under development.
Chemical products like household cleaners, pesticides, paints and perfumes that contain compounds refined from petroleum now rival motor vehicle emissions as the top source of urban air pollution, according to a surprising NOAA-led study