How can a relatively small increase in the average temperature of the planet lead to numerous record-breaking heat waves? Part of the reason can be gleaned from a single graph.
An email exchange following Part I revealed the enthusiasm of the Boulder weather community for clouds and the presence of many instruments probing the atmosphere over Boulder—and, in the end, the height of the formation.
Millions of eyes were on the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton even as another major UK news story took shape—one dealing with meteorology rather than monarchy.
Rick Anthes, UCAR president, looks at atmospheric predictability in general and presents some remarkable examples of recent successful experimental predictions.
Clark Evans from the University of Wisconsin examines Tropical Storm Erin, the rare cyclone that actually became stronger over Oklahoma than it did over water.
Andrew Monaghan used to spend his time analyzing mathematical models of climate change in Antarctica. Now the NCAR scientist sits down with traditional healers in remote villages in Uganda.
How could a tornado outbreak kill more than 200 people? Several factors—meteorological, geographical, and sociological—came together in a rare and deadly way.
Like a creature from a hydrologic horror flick, Devils Lake, North Dakota, has been expanding off and on for 70 years, most dramatically from the mid-1990s onward. Some of its tendrils have blocked rail lines and roadways for years.
Karen Akerlof at George Mason University has analyzed the treatment of climate modeling in the mass media. Are models a missing piece in climate change journalism?
The less-than-predicted amount of oil reaching coastlines after the Deepwater Horizon spill illuminates the difference between a projection and an actual forecast and
the challenges of making short-term projections of natural processes that can act chaotically.
In December 2010, media dutifully reported the heavy snow that battered the northeast U.S. and the United Kingdom’s coldest December in at least 100 years. Meanwhile, the sparsely populated Canadian Arctic basked in near-unprecedented mildness.
It's good to remind ourselves how far weather prediction has come in recent years. The ferocious winter storm that assailed the U.S. Atlantic coast in late December 2010 offers a great case in point.
Strong jet streams often plow into the West Coast in wintertime, but the heaviest rains and snows occur when the flow dips far south over the Pacific, allowing it to bring an atmospheric river of warm, moist air from the subtropics to California.
Huge temperature swings are well known to residents of the Front Range of Colorado, thanks to the arrival of sharp winter cold fronts as well as chinook-driven warm-ups.
Issuing a five-day weather forecast was once a daring enterprise. Today, we’re not only accustomed to long-range weather forecasts but also to seasonal-scale outlooks. Hurricanes and sea ice show how far we've come.
Julia Slingo from the U.K. Met Office foresees physicists and mathematicians engaging with many other disciplines to provide world-class weather and climate science and services.
UCAR president Rick Anthes says the good forecasts of Hurricane Earl were not unusual. The accuracy of hurricane track forecasts has increased steadily over the years.
A new computer simulation of a deadly, fast-spreading 2006 wildfire in California shows how far researchers have come in their quest to better understand fire dynamics.
