On the afternoon of April 13, 2018, a large wave of water surged across Lake Michigan and flooded the shores of the picturesque beach town of Ludington, Michigan, damaging homes and boat docks, and flooding intake pipes. Thanks to a local citizen’s photos and other data, NOAA scientists reconstructed the event in models and determined this was the first ever documented meteotsunami in the Great Lakes caused by an atmospheric inertia-gravity wave.
Sea Grant and its research partners has announced two updates on efforts to better understand red snapper populations in U.S. coastal waters.
Government interventions, such as mask mandates and school closures, rather than meteorological factors appear to have primarily influenced COVID-19’s spread in 2020 and early 2021, according to a new report.
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.
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.
In late February, as the Southern Plains and Gulf Coast suffered through an unusually strong blast of wintry weather, weather talk turned to the polar vortex and the possibility that the extreme cold was yet another example of weather-gone-wild due to global warming.
NOAA and partners have released the source code for its next-generation short-range forecast application to the weather research community to accelerate development of the model, which predicts atmospheric behavior on a timescale from less than an hour to several days, including critical life-saving weather and water forecasts during extreme events.
All tornadoes -- whether large or small -- originate from thunderstorms, but not all thunderstorms are the same. Nighttime twisters, summer tornadoes and smaller events can be tougher to forecast. New research in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society presents a method for rating the skill of tornado warnings based on environmental challenges.
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.