The soaking brought to the Gulf region by tropical cyclones in September 2020 contrasted starkly with the hot, dry conditions in the West.
News & Features
The latest maps from NOAA's Climate Prediction Center show where October 2020 is forecast to be much hotter and drier than average in the U.S. It's not a great outlook for the wildfire-affected West.
Guest blogger Marybeth Arcodia explains her latest research into how the Madden-Julian Oscillation and ENSO sometimes enhance each other's influence on U.S. precipitation and other times cancel each other out.
Arctic sea ice extent likely reached its annual minimum for 2020 on September 15. For the second time in the satellite record, sea ice extent dipped below 1.5 million square miles (4 million square kilometers).
A new NOAA-funded index scores U.S. states' long-term vulnerability to drought, based on a combination of sensitivity, exposure, and their ability to adapt.
August 2020 was the second-hottest August on record, and it ended the hottest summer on record for the Northern Hemisphere.
Extreme heat in the U.S. Southwest carried August 2020 into the record books as the country’s third-warmest August in the 126-year record. Despite heavy rain from landfalling tropical cyclones, national average precipitation was in the driest third of the record.
La Niña is here and likely to continue through the winter. Our blogger covers current tropical Pacific conditions and what La Niña can mean for global weather and climate.
The September 2020 temperature and precipitation outlook favors a warmer- and drier-than-average September across the western United States, and a wetter-than-average month across the south-central Plains and much of the East.
Our guest blogger, Dr. Sang-Ki Lee, introduces us to a member of the El Niño family who lives in the tropical Atlantic Ocean.