On April 22, 2014, the U.S. Postal Service is celebrating Earth Day by unveiling a new Forever international rate stamp inspired by a simulation of sea surface temperatures from a NOAA model of the Earth’s climate. The round stamp depicts the globe with North America in the center, surrounded by vivid bands of blue, green and red, signifying the varying temperatures of sea surface waters.
Later this year, NOAA’s National Weather Service will usher into daily operations a sophisticated model called the High-Resolution Rapid Refresh, or HRRR, that will update forecasts hourly over the entire lower 48 United States at extremely sharp resolution using the latest observations from a network of ground and satellite-based sensors, radars and aircraft.
The HRRR provides forecast information at a resolution four times finer than what is currently used in hourly updated NOAA models. This improvement in resolution from 13 to three kilometers is like giving forecasters an aerial photograph in which each pixel represents a neighborhood instead of a city.
Scientists aboard the NOAA Gulfstream IV aircraft are flying over the Pacific Ocean off the U.S. West Coast this week to measure air pressure, temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction to help better understand atmospheric rivers - narrow conveyor belts of water vapor that can bring beneficial water supply and snowpack as well as create dangerous floods.
NOAA and the U.S. Navy are teaming up with academic and other government scientists to design the next generation of powerful supercomputer models to predict weather, ocean conditions and regional climate change.
Four teams of scientists are beginning projects this month to rewrite computer models that will create faster, lower-cost, better integrated models. These new models will take advantage of new supercomputers that use more energy efficient/lower-cost processors such as those originally developed for the video gaming industry.
Knowing when, where and what to grow or graze animals can be the difference between a bumper harvest and facing starvation. Rainwatch provides monsoon rainfall data in real time from monitoring stations and tracks the key seasonal attributes important for food production.
Scientists have found that wispy cirrus clouds have cores of dust and metallic particles, answering questions about how these clouds form and giving insight into their climatic implications in the future.