A new National Academies of Sciences' report calls on several federal agencies to work together to improve techniques for measuring one of the most important greenhouse gases produced by humans - methane.
People have become familiar with “bomb cyclones” this winter, as several powerful winter storms brought strong winds and heavy precipitation to the U.S. east coast, knocking out power and causing flooding.
Meteorologists can tell you whether it will storm 10 days before your wedding, and climatologists can determine if you’re likely to have a hot and dry summer almost a year in advance. But the time period in between, known as the subseasonal to seasonal (S2S) timescale, has remained a major weather-climate prediction gap despite growing public demand.
A new analysis of heat wave patterns appearing today in Nature Climate Change concludes that climate change driven by the buildup of human-caused greenhouse gases will overtake natural variability as the main cause of heat waves in the western United States by the late 2020s and by the mid-2030s in the Great Lakes region.
Those long, intense plumes of moisture in the sky known as atmospheric rivers are a vital water source to communities along the U.S. West Coast. In their absence, desiccating droughts can develop. But in their presence, they can cause extreme rain and floods that can disrupt travel, cause landslides, and trigger infrastructure failures.
Predicting the weather a few days in advance is a complex undertaking. But what about the weather 3 to 4 weeks from now?
For more than two decades, Elizabeth Hunke has worked at the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory to design, create and improve a model used to predict sea ice extent, thickness and movement in both the Arctic and Antarctica. From the beginning, Hunke understood that collaboration was the key to improving this model. At a time when sea ice prediction is needed more than ever, NOAA, the Navy and other agencies are working together to extend sea ice prediction from days to decades.
Despite significant gains in controlling ground-level ozone pollution, some residents of California, Arizona, Colorado, Texas, the Midwest and the Mid-Atlantic spent more than 15 days each year between 2010 and 2014 breathing unhealthy levels of pollution, according to information from a new global database developed with NOAA support.
New NOAA research is showing we can predict snow levels in the mountains of the West in March some eight months in advance. This prediction can be down to the scale of a mountain range, which will improve regional water forecasts.
Fifty years ago, the first carbon dioxide measurement from high in the Rocky Mountains laid the groundwork for one of the climate science community's most valuable datasets.