News & Features

In the Northeast, the amount of rain that came down in very heavy events increased by more than 70 percent between 1958 and 2010. A new law in New York requires state agencies to start thinking ahead about increases in extreme rain  and other climate change risks.

Last September’s widespread flooding in northeast Colorado, which saw just over 17 inches of rain in one week in the city of Boulder, was not made more likely or more intense by the influence of human-induced climate change on atmospheric moisture.

Alaska’s coastal waters are especially vulnerable to the drop in pH—acidification—that comes when excess carbon dioxide dissolves into the ocean from the atmosphere. These maps show relative risk levels for commerical and subsistence fisheries.

The forecasts often provided useful information for the coming few months, but had more limited accuracy and value in forecasting beyond that.

The annual minimum was 5.02 million square kilometers (1.94 million square miles), making 2014 the sixth smallest extent in the satellite era, which began in 1979.

A new paper: "Modeling regional aerosol variability over California and its sensitivity to emissions and long-range transport during the 2010 CalNex and CARES campaigns," has been published in the ... ...

August 2014's globally averaged surface temperature and sea surface temperatures both set new records.

As of late August 2014, tropical atmospheric temperatures appear to be responding more strongly to the ocean than they typically do at this early stage of El Niño development.   

Natural variability can explain much of Earth's average temperature variation since the end of the last ice age, but over the past century, global average temperature has risen from near the coldest to the warmest levels in the past 11,300 years.

Temperature extremes have been pretty unusual across the United States so far in 2014. Looking back over this time period quickly reveals at least part of what was going on: the polar jet stream got into a serious rut.