Can a distant hurricane play havoc with your GPS unit? Scientists aren’t sure of the answer, but they suspect that hurricanes affect more than land and water.
NCAR's Peggy LeMone reflects on the power of fire in the Rocky Mountain West and on her own encounter with a destructive wildfire that torched more than 100 homes in September 2010.
The wildfire that erupted in the foothills west of Boulder in September 2010 sent a thick plume of smoke right over NCAR’s chemistry labs. Even as their offices smelled of smoke, scientists took measurements from the roof.
Just as the U.S. economy began a dramatic nosedive in 2007, so did the Arctic’s summertime sea ice. In the summer of 2010, the ice—much like the economy—continued to struggle.
In 1988, it was the spectre of Yellowstone National Park on fire. In 2003, it was the horror of thousands dying from heat in prosperous western Europe. The planet’s standout heat wave in 2010 plagued much of European Russia, including Moscow.
In Kansas City and Tulsa, overnight lows have seldom dipped much below 80°F, with consistently oppressive humidity. Pulses of tropical air flowing north and east from the Gulf of Mexico are largely to blame.
As the public and political dialogue surrounding climate change heats up, UCAR's Jack Fellows finds that climate change science has never been more rigorous and exciting.
The difference between El Niño and La Niña can be a huge one for U.S. weather and for global climate. A strong El Niño can nudge global temperatures upward for up to a year.
An evening baseball game brings a lesson on how temperature affects insects, and thus the behavior of insect-catching birds—in this case, a pair of western kingbirds.
The year 2010 brought a difficult and sometimes tragic few months of weather events—first the snowstorms and record cold that battered much of the Northern Hemisphere, then tornadoes and floods in the United States.
There’s only so much air to go around. Since we inhale trillions of molecules with every breath, a few of them may have been exhaled by people who lived hundreds or thousands of years ago.
Residents of the mid-Atlantic can be forgiven if they’re craving a bit of calm. The weekend of 5–6 February brought what’s been variously dubbed Snowpocalypse II, Snowmageddon, Snowtastrophe, and the Superbowl Superstorm.
Even if the onslaught paled next to great winter outbreaks of the past, it was impressively persistent across some influential areas, including southeast England and the U.S. mid-Atlantic.
Clearly, the end of the Copenhagen conference isn’t the end of work on climate change—though, with regards to Winston Churchill, it might be the end of the beginning.
Rich Anthes, UCAR president, believes that it is vital that we pay attention to what electronic communication can take from us, as well as what it can give us.
Amid the strife of the Copenhagen climate summit, one area of acknowledged progress was in ways to help preserve tropical forests and their vast stores of carbon in developing countries.
