A NOAA-sponsored report shows that the warming trend transforming the Arctic persisted in 2017, resulting in the second warmest air temperatures, above average ocean temperatures, loss of sea ice, and a range of human, ocean and ecosystem effects.

Now in its 12th year, the Arctic Report Card, released today at the annual American Geophysical Union fall meeting in New Orleans, is a peer-reviewed report that brings together the work of 85 scientists from 12 nations.

To help untangle fact from speculation, Cornell climate scientists and their colleagues have developed a “robust null hypothesis” to assess the odds of a megadrought – one that lasts more than 30 years – occurring in the western and southwestern United States. The research was published online Dec. 8 in the Journal of Climate.

Maps of the world’s most important wilderness areas are now freely available online following a University of Queensland and Wildlife Conservation Society-led study published today.

NASA analyzed the rainfall generated by short-lived Tropical Cyclone 04B that formed and faded over a day in the Bay of Bengal.

A new study from the Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) establishes a novel catalytic method to produce renewable acrylonitrile using 3-hydroxypropionic acid (3-HP), which can be biologically produced from sugars. This hybrid biological-catalytic process offers an alternative to the conventional petrochemical production method and achieves unprecedented acrylonitrile yields.

The forests you see today are not what you will see in the future. That’s the overarching finding from a new study on the resilience of Rocky Mountain forests, led by Colorado State University.

Researchers analyzed data from nearly 1,500 sites in five states — Colorado, Wyoming, Washington, Idaho, and Montana — and measured more than 63,000 seedlings after 52 wildfires that burned over the past three decades. They wanted to understand if and how changing climate over the last several decades affected post-fire tree regeneration, a key indicator of forest resilience.

The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory’s Marine Meteorology Division in Monterey, California, houses a team of scientists and engineers who work in conjunction with the lab’s broader scientific community to provide the fleet with the most accurate weather forecasts possible.

Enhanced monitoring tool adds groundwater storage to assessment factors

For millennia, the Beaufort Gyre — a massive wind-driven current in the Arctic Ocean — has been regulating climate and sea ice formation at the top of the world. Like a giant spinning top, the gyre corrals vast amounts of sea ice. Trapped in this clockwise swirl, the ice has historically had more time to thicken than it generally does in other parts of the Arctic Ocean, where currents such as the Trans Polar Drift transport the ice into the warmer north Atlantic more rapidly. In this way, the Beaufort Gyre — located north of Alaska and Canada’s Yukon Territory — has helped create the abundant layers of sea ice that, until recently, covered large parts of the Arctic Ocean year-round.

Shrinking glacier cover could lead to increased volcanic activity in Iceland, scientists have warned.

A new study, led by the University of Leeds, found there was less volcanic activity in Iceland when glacier cover was more extensive. As the glaciers melted, volcanic eruptions increased due to subsequent changes in surface pressure.