In the lonely reaches of northwestern North Dakota and across the border into Saskatchewan, the vast Bakken oil field hosts extensive activities to extract both crude oil and natural gas. Business is booming—production increased by 30 percent between May 2013 and May 2014. More than a quarter of the total gas produced from the Bakken operations can’t be processed fast enough, though, and the common industry practice is to flare it—burn it off as it is vented to the atmosphere. Jutting 30 feet upward like enormous lit matchsticks, the flares pose a new question for atmospheric scientists: What do the flares put into the air? A new NOAA-led study has produced the first direct measurements of how much black carbon—a major component of airborne particles that are commonly referred to as soot —is emitted by the Bakken flaring operations.
(September 1) Today NOAA released a free, downloadable flat screen version of its popular Science On a Sphere® (SOS), SOS ExplorerTM. This new way to display the dynamics of Earth’s weather and climate, plate tectonics and more will help teachers bring these stunning science visualizations, usually found at museums and science centers, into the classroom, where students can learn by exploring.
Spring came early this year, breaking several records at the top of the world in Barrow, Alaska, according to a new report that combines observations from NOAA, the North Slope Borough and a scientist who has tracked an Arctic bird for the last four decades.
California’s ongoing extreme drought must be a lesson for managing water in a warmer, more densely populated world, says a team of NOAA and University of California climatologists and hydrologists in an essay this week in Nature.
New research appearing online today in the journal Nature Climate Change by NOAA and partners forecasts the effects of climate change on countries' economic output and suggests that rising greenhouse gases may contribute to more extreme El Niños, the climate phenomenon that can trigger severe weather.
Scientists from NOAA and the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies at the University of Miami have documented a dramatic shift from vibrant coral communities to carpets of algae in remote Pacific Ocean waters where an underwater volcano spews carbon dioxide.
New collaborative research between NOAA, University of Alaska and an Alaskan shellfish hatchery shows that ocean acidification may make it difficult for Alaskan coastal waters to support shellfish hatcheries by 2040 unless costly mitigation efforts are installed to modify seawater used in the hatcheries.
New research by NOAA, University of Alaska, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the journal Oceanography shows that surface waters of the Chukchi and Beaufort seas could reach levels of acidity that threaten the ability of animals to build and maintain their shells by 2030, with the Bering Sea reaching this level of acidity by 2044.
It is too soon to know if recent extreme cold weather such as the last two East Coast winters are linked to Arctic climate warming, according to new research published in the Journal of Climate by James Overland of NOAA, and other authors from North America, Asia and Europe.