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Some winters are colder than others and some winters are wetter and snowier than others. Trivia Question: What is the best way to predict what kind of winter you will have? a) Look at how intense the Sun is right now b) Look at how much ice there is in the Arctic c) Look at [...]

In Brief: From January 2000 to October 24, 2010, 310,531 record high temperatures were set across the contiguous United States. During the same period, 152,087 record low temperatures were set, giving a record highs to record lows ratio of more than 2:1. There are close to 5,000 quality-controlled weather stations across the United States and [...]

Plants use the sun’s energy to turn carbon dioxide in the air into the organic matter, or carbohydrates, that make up their bodies. Each year, Earth’s land plants take about 123 petagrams (123,000,000,000,000,000 grams) of carbon out of the atmosphere. About the same amount of carbon is respirated back into the air, however, leading to [...]

In Brief: Volcanic dust stimulated a large phytoplankton bloom in August 2008. On August 7, 2008, the Aleutian Island volcano of Kasatochi erupted, spewing out volcanic ash rich in minerals such as aluminum, magnesium, iron and calcium. Winds carried this ash to the subarctic northeast Pacific Ocean. About 20 percent of Earth’s ocean surface, including [...]

In the air around us, there are tiny particles called aerosols. Aerosols include things like smoke, volcanic ash and mineral dust sent into the atmosphere by winds. Although these aerosols are usually too small to see, they affect the climate directly by scattering incoming sunlight as well as indirectly by affecting how clouds form. While [...]

Earth’s carbon dioxide (CO2) levels rose from about 315 parts per million in 1960 to around 390 parts per million today. CO2 levels vary from place to place around the globe, with urban areas generally having higher concentrations than surrounding rural areas. Levels also vary based on the time of day. In temperate zones, for [...]

A new ClimateCenter video report from Climate Central discusses NOAA’s latest global temperature analysis and the hurricane season.

Plants use the sun’s energy to turn carbon dioxide (CO2) in the air into the organic matter, or carbohydrates, that make up their bodies. This process, known as photosynthesis, ultimately feeds the rest of the food chain, with grazers eating the plants and carnivores and omnivores eating the grazers. How much carbon land plants take [...]

In Brief: Nights are warmer than they were in the early 1970s, which exacerbates the urban heat island effect and heat related health problems. Heat waves, which in the United States kill up to 1,000 people per year, are defined as prolonged periods of abnormally hot weather. They can occur at any time of the [...]

The oceans are currently absorbing about 22 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) each day and have absorbed an estimated 525 billion tons of CO2 over the last 200 years. Trivia Question: As the oceans absorb more carbon dioxide, they become… a. more basic (higher pH). b. more acidic (lower pH). c. richer in nutrients. [...]

While Lake Chad today covers an area of around 115-200 square miles, at the end of the last ice age (12,000 years ago), there was Lake Megachad, which covered an area as large as 154,000 square miles. Rivers flowing into the lake brought in sediments from the surrounding landscape, and the bodies of plankton growing [...]

Warm ocean surface temperatures in the North Atlantic provide the warm and moist air that fuels hurricanes, which develop out of random disturbances in the tropics that provide the spark for these storms. Warmer waters in the North Atlantic generally mean more fuel for the storms. But did you know that surface temperature conditions in [...]

The term cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) is a fancy way of describing the tiny particles that even smaller water vapor droplets cling to as raindrops form. Once enough water vapor droplets gather on the nuclei, raindrops fall. This is a critical part of Earth’s water cycle, which moves water from the oceans to the land, [...]

Without a steady supply of oxygen in the air around us, we would suffocate. Compared to other planets in our solar system, Earth’s concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere is exceptional. Of the air that goes into your lungs, 78 percent is nitrogen and 21 percent is oxygen. The remaining one percent is a combination [...]

In Brief: Wheat grown under elevated ambient carbon dioxide levels is less nutritious that wheat grown under current levels. Atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) is a key plant nutrient, as carbon is the primary building block of all life on Earth. Other building blocks, however, are just as essential. Nitrogen, for example, is the mineral that [...]

The 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo injected into the atmosphere about 20 million tons of a certain substance, which blocked the incoming sunlight causing a global cooling of one degree Fahrenheit over 18 months. Trivia Question: What was this substance? a. Carbon dioxide (CO2) b. Carbon monoxide (CO) c. Sulfur dioxide (SO2) d. Ash The [...]

Since the 1750′s, the amount of methane (CH4) in the atmosphere has increased by 250 percent. Much of this methane is emitted from lakes in northern regions. Glacial movement across the far North (north of 45 degrees) during the last ice age leveled the landscape, carved depressions in the bedrock and deposited ice that formed [...]

In Brief: Compared to the 1980′s, more carbon is now being released into the atmosphere from the soil. How changes in the carbon cycle affect Earth’s temperature and how Earth’s temperature affects the carbon cycle are two key questions for climate research. In 2008, there was a net release of about 98 petagrams (98 billion [...]

In Brief: More irrigation likely drove a 3.6 degree Fahrenheit decline in average summertime daily maximum temperatures between 1934 and 2002 at weather stations in heavily farmed areas of California. Over the past few centuries, large parts of North America were converted from native ecosystems to agricultural and urban landscapes. Agricultural land now covers about [...]

In Brief: Higher elevation areas are experiencing the overall global trend of wind speed “stilling” more acutely than surrounding lowlands. Wind speeds in the mid-latitudes have shown a downward trend over the past 30-50 years, a phenomenon known as “stilling.” Any trends in wind speed have implications for the water cycle, ecosystems and wind energy [...]