The surface melt season on Greenland lasted up to 30 days longer than average in 2011, and it affected 31 percent of the ice sheet surface. Ice mass loss from Greenland in 2011 was about 430 gigatons—enough ice to raise global sea level by just over 1 millimeter.
Satellite observations show that as the Arctic tundra has grown warmer in the past three decades, it has also grown “greener.”
Molly Heller is part of a team of scientists who processes flasks of air samples in NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, CO. Week in and week out, Heller and her colleagues unpack sealed glass flasks shipped back to Boulder from dozens of remote sites around the world. What’s inside is priceless: air captured from a site near Tasmania’s Cape Grim; from Summit, Greenland; the Canary Islands; the South Pole.
The types of tree species that grow in a particular region determine the range of bright colors that paint our landscapes during the fall season. In the future, scientists project that the forest habitats all around us may undergo major changes to due to warming temperatures.
Compared to the large ozone hole that forms over Antarctica each year, Arctic ozone loss has generally been much more limited. But in 2011, Arctic ozone declined to surprisingly low levels. What did climate have to do with it?
The low ice extent recorded this September continued the downward trend seen over the last 30 years. Meanwhile, scientists are finding that the ice cover has grown thinner, making it more vulnerable to melting during the summer.
Each summer, the seasonal unraveling of the Arctic’s blanket of ice exposes large areas of the ocean to solar heating. The smaller the ice extent, the larger the potential warming influence. Arctic sea ice extent in July 2011 was the lowest for that month in the satellite record.
Starting in July, when you hear that a day was hotter, or colder, or rainier than normal, that normal will be a little different from what it was in the past.
For decades, the City of Boulder, Colorado, has been successfully managing its water supply despite the challenges of being located in a semi-arid climate. But a local water manager wonders if climate change will change the rules of the game...
As of 2024, the warming effect of long-lived greenhouse gases in Earth's atmosphere had increased by 54% compared to 1990. Relative to pre-industrial times, today's atmosphere absorbs 3.54 extra Watts of heat energy per square meter.