In the News Archive

Risk of a monster quake and tsunami off California's North Coast is greater than researchers once thought.

A more acidic bay could make it more difficult for mollusks, such as oysters, to build their shells through a process called calcification. 

PMEL-led research using climate model predictions concludes the Arctic climate will continue to show major changes over the next decades.

Some of the worst El Niños, the infamous climate patterns that shake up weather around the world, could double in frequency in upcoming decades due to global warming, says a new study out Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Meteorologists called it “weather whiplash” — a drop of roughly 50 degrees in a matter of hours that took temperatures from 55 in Central Park on Monday morning to a record low of 5 overnight and an expected high on Tuesday of only 10. The last time temperatures in New York fell that much in such a short time, Warren G. Harding was in the White House.

The Arctic caught a bit of a break in 2013 from the recent string of record-breaking warmth and ice melt of the last decade. But the relatively cool year in some parts of the Arctic does little to offset the long-term trend of the last 30 years: the Arctic is warming rapidly, becoming greener and experiencing a variety of changes, affecting people, the physical environment, and marine and land ecosystems.

Thirty years of shrinking Arctic sea ice has boosted extreme summer weather, including heat waves and drought, in the United States and elsewhere, according to a study published today (Dec. 8) in the journal Nature Climate Change. 

A hurricane hunter aircraft sent to the Arctic to study ice formations returned this month with critical data that might explain why an increasing number of tropical storms seem to be taking irregular paths.

Research Meteorologist Nick Bond said the group is trying to find out what is happening in the marginal ice zones along the shores. He said diminishing ice is creating more open spaces that could lead to warming temperatures and changes in the normal global weather flows. One theory is that disruption may have redirected Hurricane Sandy toward the Atlantic Coast last year.
 

El Niño is likely to become more intense with climate change, and produce drier conditions for Australia and the Western Pacific, with increases in rainfall in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific in the mid to late twenty first century, according to new research.