Weather and Climate

Extreme heat has been breaking records across Europe, Asia and North America, with millions of people sweltering in heat and humidity well above “normal” for days on end. “When will it get too hot for normal daily activity as we know it, even for young, healthy adults?” Here are some answers.

Cold spells often bring climate change deniers out in force. From a scientific standpoint, these claims of disproof are absurd. Fluctuations in the weather don’t refute clear long-term trends in the climate. Yet many people believe these claims, and the political result has been reduced willingness to take action to mitigate climate change.

During El Niño, a swath of ocean stretching 6,000 miles warms for months on end, typically by 2 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit–more than enough to completely reorganize wind, rainfall and temperature patterns all over the planet.

Meteorologists have gotten a lot better at forecasting the conditions that make tornadoes more likely. But predicting exactly which thunderstorms will produce a tornado and when is harder, and that’s where a lot of severe weather research is focused today.

The world is in deep trouble on climate change, but if we really put our shoulder to the wheel we can turn things around. Loosely, that’s the essence of today’s report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Atmospheric rivers, those long, powerful streams of moisture in the sky, are becoming more frequent in the Arctic, and they’re helping to drive dramatic shrinking of the Arctic’s sea ice cover. Sea ice loss contributes to global warming and to extreme storms that cause economic damage well beyond the Arctic.

U.S. weather disasters are getting costlier as more people move into vulnerable areas and climate change raises the risks of extreme heat and rainfall. Even with an average hurricane season, 2022 had the third-highest number of billion-dollar disasters in the U.S. since 1980.

The year 2022 will be remembered across the U.S. for its devastating flooding, storms and hurricanes – and also for its extreme heat waves and droughts, including one so severe it briefly shut down traffic on the Mississippi River.

Hurricanes leave behind telltale evidence that goes back millennia. The Atlantic has experienced even stormier periods in the past than we’ve seen in recent years. That’s not good news. It tells coastal oceanographers like me that we may be significantly underestimating the threat hurricanes pose to Caribbean islands and the North American coast in the future.

This year’s climate summit is seen as the one that can bring concrete actions and commitments on emission reductions and also on the financing of losses and damages resulting from climate change to the global south. But will it be more successful than previous summits?

Of all the hazards that hurricanes bring, storm surge is the greatest threat to life and property along the coast. It can sweep homes off their foundations, flood riverside communities miles inland, and break up dunes and levees that normally protect coastal areas against storms.

The leader of NOAA’s hurricane field program and a University of Miami meteorologist describes the experience aboard a P-3 Orion as it plunges through the eyewall of a hurricane and the technology the team uses to gauge hurricane behavior in real time.

While Ian travels up the Florida coast, these outer bands will stretch over much of the peninsula and produce heavy rain for many locations, beginning as early as Monday night for South Florida and late Wednesday for northern parts of the state.

The huge storm had a very low atmospheric pressure (931.6 mb) — which is the lowest ever recorded for a tropical storm that made landfall in Canada. Low pressure weather systems are associated with strong winds and heavy rains.

“The Limits to Growth,” an extension of biologist Paul Ehrlich’s bestselling “The Population Bomb,” was way off in some regards, but dead on in this one: Humans must limit and soon reduce their aggregate production of greenhouse gas emissions.

A heat dome occurs when a persistent region of high pressure traps heat over an area. The heat dome can stretch over several states and linger for days to weeks, leaving the people, crops and animals below to suffer through stagnant, hot air that can feel like an oven.

Antarctica is a continent comprising several large islands, one of them the size of Australia, all buried under a 10,000-foot-thick layer of ice. The ice holds enough fresh water to raise sea level by nearly 200 feet. You don’t want its glaciers melting. They are.

The Loop Current is the 800-pound gorilla of Gulf hurricane risks. When the Loop Current reaches this far north this early in the hurricane season – especially during what’s forecast to be a busy season – it can spell disaster for folks along the Northern Gulf Coast, from Texas to Florida.

New Mexico and Arizona are facing a dangerously early fire season, with 600 fires leaving neighborhoods in ashes and triggering a federal disaster declaration. A scientist explains why the unusual intensity and timing.