Ocean waves slowly eat away coastal cliffs the world over, but in parts of Alaska, these processes have accelerated due to changing climate. These photos document a cliff collapse near Drew Point in the late 2000s.
News & Features
We’d like our forecasts—both weather and climate—to be simple and certain. Because of the fluid and chaotic nature of the ocean and atmosphere, however, forecasts are never about certainty: they’re about probability.
In the midst of a drought in 2008, biologists discovered dead Coho and steelhead trout in a tributary of the Russian River. When the dust settled, the focus turned to how winegrowers and other water users could reduce their impact. The event provided the parties involved—winegrowers, conservationists, and the water agency—an opportunity to find common ground in the realm of science.
How does El Niño affect U.S. winter temperature and precipitation?
Add a new item to the list of things that have migrated in response to climate change: the latitude where hurricanes reach their maximum intensity. The shift was accompanied by increasing vertical wind shear near the equator.
Chances that an El Niño will occur by summer are above 70%, hitting 80% by the fall. But subsurface temperature anomalies have tapered off some from earlier this spring, decreasing the odds the event will be as strong as the El Niño of 1997-98.
On August 25, 2011, Dr. Elwynn Taylor, Iowa State University's Extension Climatologist, tweeted to Iowa corn farmers: “Weather based statistics indicate a US corn yield of 149BPA, the prime factor this year is the Aridity Index.” Taylor uses NOAA climate information and seasonal outlooks to help thousands of the region's farmers manage risk. Nearly 5,000 followers look to his Twitter feed for guidance.
Since 2004, researchers in NOAA’s Global Monitoring Division have released the Annual Greenhouse Gas Index: a single value that compares the total warming effect of each year's concentrations of heat-trapping gases to 1990 levels.
El Niño typically favors stronger hurricane activity in the central and eastern Pacific basins, and suppresses it in the Atlantic basin. Where does that leave the 2014 hurricane outlook?
In response to recent decades' warming, forests in the eastern United States have been "inhaling" more carbon dioxide through photosynthesis than they've “exhaled” through respiration.