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.
NOAA science expertise and data has supported the U.S. government decision to reduce potent greenhouse gas emissions. On September 21st, the United States Senate successfully approved the Kigali Amendment of the Montreal Protocol with strong bipartisan support. The Kigali Amendment, negotiated under the Obama administration in 2016, is an international agreement to phase-out and replace hydrofluorocarbons, a class of chemicals that act as potent greenhouse gasses.
NOAA atmospheric measurements are helping to support a national inventory of emissions from an important family of greenhouse gases.
High background levels of ozone pollution make it hard for Las Vegas and other southwestern cities to meet US air quality standards in spring, two NOAA studies find. But local pollution sources drive summer's high ozone days.
New NOAA analysis of a ground-breaking global atmospheric airborne research mission shows that smoke from biomass burning substantially contributes to one of the most common and harmful constituents of urban air pollution: ozone.
This year’s ozone hole developed similarly to last year's: A colder than usual Southern Hemisphere winter lead to a deep and larger-than-average hole that will likely persist into November or early December.
When COVID-19 pandemic began in the US, counties and cities across the nation imposed stay at home orders, closed schools or imposed travel restrictions. From March 2020 onward, many Americans hung up car keys and settled into their homes for work and school. Traffic patterns dramatically changed, and previously smog filled vistas became clearer.
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.
Researchers have mapped global ground-level ozone concentrations by year for the Global Burden of Disease study using a data fusion approach, the first time this method was applied to ozone observations.
New analyses of global air measurements show that five years after an unexpected spike in emissions of the banned ozone-depleting chemical chlorofluorocarbon CFC-11, they dropped sharply between 2018 and 2019.