Even when the tropical Pacific is coasting along in neutral, there’s plenty to talk about.
News & Features
Climate experts are keeping their eyes on the tropical Pacific, watching a strip of cool water that may be one indicator that La Niña is brewing.
A checkerboard of drought conditions has developed across the United States east of the Rockies between spring and summer 2016. Since March, the total drought-affected area of the country has nearly doubled.
California’s supply of groundwater is heavily affected by drought, which is in turn affected by ENSO. Our guest blogger discusses some of these complex relationships.
Using measurements taken worldwide, scientists estimated that 2015’s global average carbon dioxide concentration was 399.4 parts per million (ppm), a new record high. At Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawai’i, where atmospheric carbon dioxide has been recorded longer than anywhere else in the world, the annual average carbon dioxide concentration was 400.8—also a new record, and a new milestone.
2015 was a tough year for vegetation, both natural and agricultural, with a near-record area of global land surfaces in some state of drought.
Globally, 2015 set a new record for the most extremely warm days in the 66-year record (1.8 times more than the average). The number of extremely warm days and nights was the highest ever recorded in western North America, parts of central Europe, and central Asia.
Long-term warming and a strong El Niño contributed to the highest annual combined temperature for ocean and land since reliable records began in the mid-to-late 1800s.
Every year hundreds of scientists from scores of countries team up to give the Earth's climate a comprehensive physical. Edited by NOAA scientists and published by the American Meteorological Society, the State of the Climate in 2015 draws on tens of thousands of observations of everything from forest fires to fish migration to catalog climate variability and change.
In 2015, glaciers across the globe, on average, continued to shrink for the 36th consecutive year.