• Led by Dr. Julie Loisel, these geography undergraduates’ unforgettable summer trip was actually quite cold.

  • Novel UCSD study indicates global warming is costing U.S. economy about $250 billion per year.

  • A new study suggests the power industry is underestimating how climate change could affect the long-term demand for electricity in the United States.

  • Tropical Storm Kirk formed on Saturday, Sept. 22. By Monday, Sept. 24, Kirk lacked the closed circulation that is a prerequisite for tropical cyclone status.  The NOAA-20 satellite provided a visible image of the storm at its peak.

  • America’s national parks are warming up and drying out much faster than the rest of the United States, according to a new study on the impacts of climate change on U.S. parks published in the journal Environmental Research Letters. The changing conditions are threatening protected ecosystems from the Everglades in Florida to Denali National Park in Alaska.

  • While conducting hydrographic surveys at the request of the U.S. Coast Guard following Hurricane Florence, NOAA’s Office of Coast Survey navigation response teams (NRT) identified hazardous obstructions in the Cape Fear River channel.

  • Each year, fishermen harvest more than $500 million worth of Atlantic sea scallops from the waters off the east coast of the United States. A new model created by scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), however, predicts that those fisheries may potentially be in danger. As levels of carbon dioxide increase in the Earth’s atmosphere, the upper oceans become increasingly acidic—a condition that could reduce the sea scallop population by more than 50% in the next 30 to 80 years, under a worst-case scenario.  Strong fisheries management and efforts to reduce CO2 emissions, however, might slow or even stop that trend.

  • NASA’s Terra satellite provided an infrared look at Tropical Storm Trami, located just over 100 miles from Guam on Sept. 21. Infrared data provides temperature information that showed two areas of the highest, coldest cloud tops and most powerful storms within the tropical storm.

  • A new type of battery developed by researchers at MIT could be made partly from carbon dioxide captured from power plants. Rather than attempting to convert carbon dioxide to specialized chemicals using metal catalysts, which is currently highly challenging, this battery could continuously convert carbon dioxide into a solid mineral carbonate as it discharges.

  • On the cusp of our atmosphere live a thin group of seasonal electric blue clouds. Forming 50 miles above the poles in summer, these clouds are known as noctilucent clouds or polar mesospheric clouds — PMCs. A recent NASA long-duration balloon mission observed these clouds over the course of five days at their home in the mesosphere. The resulting photos, which scientists have just begun to analyze, will help us better understand turbulence in the atmosphere, as well as in oceans, lakes and other planetary atmospheres, and may even improve weather forecasting.