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?
A thunderstorm complex that toppled trees and knocked out power from Illinois to the Delaware coast brought to light a weather term with an obscure but intriguing history.
NCAR scientists have performed one of the most detailed simulations ever of a massive tornado outbreak. They simulated two waves of tornadic storms that occurred on April 27,2011 in Alabama, the deadliest U.S. tornado day since 1925.
Rick Anthes, UCAR president, looks at atmospheric predictability in general and presents some remarkable examples of recent successful experimental predictions.
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?
Last year, a team of NCAR scientists verified that the Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF) can be used to depict seasonal snowfall in Colorado with a high degree of accuracy. Now the team is using WRF to forecast future snowfall.
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.
Talea Mayo, University of Texas at Austin • No two days are the same for this student of computational and applied mathematics. She's working to improve hurricane storm surge predictions by focusing on how data gets added, or "assimilated," into a forecasting model.
A team of scientists led by NCAR’s Keith Oleson has incorporated urban areas into a global climate model. The development is important because most models used for predicting future climate change do not account for the urban “heat island” effect.
It’s been a busy spring for community climate modeling at NCAR. One major release pushes the veteran CCSM forward. Another release is on the way: the Community Earth System Model, which brings a new paradigm into the mix.
NCAR scientist Natasha Flyer is using an innovative method known as radial basis function (RBF) to model simple physical processes in the geosciences. The research is poised to offer a new way of solving equations that could significantly improve models used by atmospheric and solar scientists.
By simulating 8,000 years of climate, a team led by scientists from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and NCAR has found a new explanation for the last major period of global warming, which occurred about 14,500 years ago.
In a breakthrough that will help scientists unlock mysteries of the Sun and its impacts on Earth, an international team of scientists led by NCAR has created the first-ever comprehensive computer model of sunspots.
A new technique developed at NCAR will help asteroseismologists learn about stars from their oscillations, or “starquakes.” These variations in the brightness of stars reveal information about their internal structures.
One of the challenges for global climate modelers is accurately simulating cloud cover and its changes over time. This is vital for projecting future temperatures, rainfall, and other aspects of global and regional climate change.
Using a highly efficient modeling technique, Pablo Ortiz (University of Granada) and Piotr Smolarkiewicz (ESSL/MMM) have simulated the role of winds in forming sand dunes and sandholes.
NCAR researchers are looking at how new generations of super-fast Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) and multicore chips, such as the Cell Broadband Engine, can be used in atmospheric models.
NCAR scientists are working on a bigger, bolder version of WACCM (the Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model), called WACCM-eXtension, or WACCM-X for short. The enhanced version extends the model to an altitude of about 310 miles.
A team of researchers that includes NCAR’s Synte Peacock and Frank Bryan has carried out the first-ever century-long global ocean simulations with high enough resolution to capture mesoscale eddies.
Several red-eye commercial flights were rocked by moderate to severe turbulence as they flew across northeast Kansas early on June 17, 2005. A new study by NCAR scientists Stan Trier and Bob Sharman uses modeling to connect storms in Oklahoma with the Kansas turbulence.
Cory Morse, NCAR's Research Applications Laboratory • Morse trained in science, but has the soul of an engineer, which makes her job as a software engineer in NCAR's applied research group a perfect fit.
