Monday, September 25th, 2023
Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas and is the second-largest contributor to climate warming after carbon dioxide. A tonne of methane, despite its shorter lifespan of about 10 years in the atmosphere, can retain an astounding 30 times more heat than a tonne of carbon dioxide over the course of a century. This means that
Monday, September 11th, 2023
Harmful algae can endanger public health and coastal ecosystems and economies. Advances in satellite imaging are providing new ways to look at our living ocean. By the time they were over, a series of massive algal blooms along the west coast of Florida in 2020 would be linked to some 2,000 tons of dead marine
Monday, August 28th, 2023
NASA released the first data maps from its new instrument launched to space earlier in 2023, which now is successfully transmitting information about major air pollutants over North America. From its orbit 22,000 miles above the equator, NASA’s TEMPO, or Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution, is the first space-based instrument designed to continuously measure
Friday, August 11th, 2023
If global temperatures keep rising and reach 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, people worldwide could face multiple impacts of climate change simultaneously. This is according to a NASA-led study that analyzed the projected impacts of such warming to understand how different climate effects might combine. A 2-degree rise in global temperatures is considered a
Monday, July 31st, 2023
More than halfway through the 2023 melting season, Greenland has seen a substantial transformation of its snow cover. Melting has been above average for much of the season, including on several days in June and July when melt was detected across 800,000 square kilometers (302,000 square miles)—up to 50 percent—of Greenland Ice Sheet’s surface, according
Monday, July 17th, 2023
June 2023 was the hottest June on record according to NASA’s global temperature analysis. Temperature anomalies reflect how June 2023 compared to the average June temperature from 1951-1980. GISTEMP, NASA’s global temperature analysis, is drawn from data collected by weather stations and Antarctic research stations as well as instruments mounted on ships and ocean buoys. NASA
Thursday, June 15th, 2023
As climate change increases the risk of wildfires across the globe, the spate of fires that hit Canada in May and June suggest that 2023 is on course to be the country’s worst fire season to date. These fires not only pose a serious threat to human life, wildlife the environment and property, they also
Tuesday, June 6th, 2023
When the dust that wafts off the Sahel and Sahara regions of Africa mixes with tropical clouds, it creates what’s known as a rainy “disturbance” in the eastern Atlantic. These disturbances are hurricanes in their youngest form, and as they travel across the ocean, they can either dissipate or grow into powerful storms. To study these
Monday, May 22nd, 2023
The most recent sea-level data from the U.S.-European satellite Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich indicates early signs of a developing El Niño across the equatorial Pacific Ocean. The data shows Kelvin waves, which are roughly 2 to 4 inches (5 to 10 centimeters) high at the ocean surface and hundreds of miles wide, moving from west to east along
Monday, May 8th, 2023
NOAA upgraded its Probabilistic Storm Surge (P-Surge) model—the primary model for predicting storm surge associated with high-impact weather like hurricanes and tropical storms—to version 3.0. This upgrade advances storm-surge modeling and forecasting for the contiguous United States (CONUS), Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, and comes just in time for the 2023 hurricane season beginning on
