See highlights from the 2017 issue of the planet's most comprehensive annual physical, the American Meteorological Society's State of the Climate report.
Understanding Climate
Explainers, factsheets, reports, and other resources
In a sidebar to the State of the Climate in 2017 report, experts describe how human-caused climate change is leading to longer, more damaging fire seasons in the evergreen-dominated boreal forests of Alaska, Canada, and Eurasia.
The State of the Climate in 2017 report includes a summary of the devastation in Puerto Rico from Hurricane María, describing damage so widespread and severe that thousands of residents of the Caribbean island moved to the U.S. mainland in the aftermath.
As part of the State of the Climate in 2017 report, experts describe a record three-year-long episode of mass coral bleaching at tropical reefs worldwide. Previous global bleaching events required the presence of El Niño, but the devastating 2014–2017 event began before El Niño emerged and continued long after it ended—implicating human-caused global warming in the mass die offs.
Now in its sixth year, a NOAA-led report published by the American Meteorological Society provides the results of more than two dozen studies of various extreme weather and climate events in 2016 and the role global warming did or didn't play in them.
NOAA scientists have released the 2017 Arctic Report Card: the complete guide to climate conditions in the planet's Far North.
If you define the start of winter as the arrival of the first snow, what's the earliest winter has arrived at the weather station nearest you?
Unusual weather conditions in 2017—including a blizzard caused by the remnants of 2016's Hurricane Nicole and a short surface melt season—are behind preliminary estimates of a small gain in ice mass on the Greenland Ice Sheet this year.
¿Qué tan buenos somos para detectar la influencia del calentamiento global en huracanes, incendios y otros eventos extremos? Estas preguntas y respuestas de nuestros archivos lo explican.
From greenhouse gases to tropical cyclones, and from the South Pole to the Sahara, the 37th issue of the annual State of the Climate report catalogs the climate in 2016.