• Hurricane Olivia’s eye was clear in infrared imagery taken by NASA’s Aqua satellite from its orbit in space.

  • Tropical Storm Florence appeared weaker in infrared imagery from NASA’s Aqua satellite, with warmer cloud top temperatures. However, forecasters believe this is a temporary setback.

  • Tropical Depression Gordon just doesn’t want to give up. Gordon is meandering in the southern U.S. and satellites pinpointed its center over Arkansas on Friday, Sept. 7. Gordon continues to soak the southern U.S. and NASA’s Aqua satellite located the strongest storms associated with the depression.

  • Bird diversity shifts upslope in tropical mountainous terrain.

  • The replacement of natural fynbos vegetation with pine plantations in the southern Cape, and the subsequent invasion of surrounding land by invasive pine trees, significantly increased the severity of the 2017 Knysna wildfires.

  • In a tie with 1934, the Summer of 2018 ranked as the fourth hottest summer on record for the contiguous United States after three months of blistering temperatures.

  • The Global Precipitation Measurement mission or GPM satellite passed over Hurricane Olivia and found heaviest rain in a tight ring around the eye.

  • A region of West Antarctica is behaving differently from most of the continent’s ice: A large patch of ice there is thickening, unlike other parts of West Antarctica that are losing ice. Whether this thickening trend will continue affects the overall amount that melting or collapsing glaciers could raise the level of the world’s oceans.

  • 56 million years ago, the Earth experienced an exceptional episode of global warming. In a very short time on a geological scale, within 10 to 20’000 years, the average temperature increased by 5 to 8 degrees, only returning to its original level a few hundred thousand years later. Based on the analysis of sediments from the southern slope of the Pyrenees, researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) measured the impact of this warming on river floods and the surrounding landscapes: the amplitude of floods increased by  a factor of eight - and sometimes even by a factor of 14 -, and vegetated landscapes may have been replaced by arid pebbly plains. Their disturbing conclusions, to be discovered in Scientific Reports, show that the consequences of such global warming may have been much greater than predicted by current climate models.

  • Crop losses for critical food grains will increase substantially with global warming, as rising temperatures boost the metabolism and population growth of insect pests, new research says.