The world of severe storm science was shaken by the deaths of three longtime researchers in a vicious tornado on May 31. The storm also raised serious questions about how urban dwellers can best respond to tornado threats.
Carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have crossed a major threshold: 400 parts per million. Here are five key points on how carbon dioxide is affecting Earth’s atmosphere and the role we're playing in it.
The last month has seen a trail of smashed records across the central United States, as pulse after pulse of cold air careened down the Great Plains. How does this fit into the bigger picture of a warming U.S. climate?
Forests across western North America have been ravaged by the most extensive bark beetle attacks on record. Scientists are getting a better handle on what comes next—and the answers aren’t as straightforward as they expected.
The past month has seen a remarkable run of challenging snow forecasts across the United States, with millions of people either much more or much less snow than they expected. But if predicting snow is a tough business, measuring it is no piece of cake either.
A major winter storm is threatening the Washington, D.C., area this week, on the heels of record-setting snowfalls and blizzard conditions in several parts of the United States last month. Are these onslaughts catching people off guard?
Satellite images have revealed at least three dramatic eye-like features not far off the U.S. Atlantic and Pacific coasts over the last several weeks. While these can look startlingly like the eyes of hurricanes, they’re not quite the same thing.
How do you determine whether some location, or the nation, is having a truly brutal winter? As it turns out, the story differs depending on whether it’s being told through events, statistics, or opinions.
Much of the United States has felt winter’s bite this week, with fresh but frigid cold to the east and a weeks-long spell of stagnant, polluted chill to the west.
Even as the rest of the nation baked in 2012, Alaska froze. The contiguous 48 U.S. states saw their warmest year on record by far, but it was one of Alaska's chilliest.
More than two days ahead of landfall, it was clear that Hurricane Sandy could bring higher water than New York and New Jersey had seen in decades. But for thousands of people in the area, the threat simply didn’t register. (Part 1 of 2)
Sandy's storm surge was more than twice that of other recent tropical cyclones in the New York City area—but several other factors teamed up to bring waters to their catastrophically high level. (Part 2 of 2)
Though we’re still more than two weeks from the end of 2012, it’s not too soon to get a sense of how the year will go down in meteorological annals. Some of the signals from January to November are so strong that December won’t change the outcome.
What if we could use the data from fevered searches for flu information on the Web, plus humidity observations, to help predict the course of an outbreak? If new research lives up to its promise, we’ll soon be able to do just that.
A number of factors—both meteorological and societal—would need to conspire for the current drought to resemble the all-out disaster of the 1930s Dust Bowl. Yet a devastating outcome could emerge with a flavor all its own.
Every so often, a quiet corner of research suddenly grabs the spotlight. Such was the case this week when a Category 1 Atlantic hurricane morphed into Superstorm Sandy.
Hurricane Sandy is on track to carve its way into weather annals. There will no doubt be devastating, deadly effects, along with some impacts one doesn’t expect in a hurricane.
Hurricane Sandy may pummel the mid-Atlantic coast early next week, possibly carving out multiple niches in U.S. weather history while producing what could easily be billions of dollars in damage.
The United States faces more varied weather risks than most nations on Earth, but we also have uniquely strong capabilities to confront these risks, thanks to decades of research conducted by government agencies, universities, and the private weather industry.
In recent months there’ve been hints of an El Niño on the horizon that might help quench the ongoing U.S. drought. But those hints might turn out to be as meaningless as a mirage on a parched highway.
The NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center’s creation emerged through a fortuitous mix of geography, technology, organizations, and people ready to make connections. We asked two of the principals involved to share the story.
Researchers at NCAR are working with forecasters and emergency managers to unravel the communication challenges around hurricanes like Isaac, which had relatively weak winds but a strong storm surge.
An engineer and water policy expert, David Behar is one of the nation’s leading voices on ways to weave weather and climate knowledge into water management.
