It's convenient to correlate extreme climate and weather events to extreme forcings, but science does not work that way.
From May to July 2012, the Great Plains region of the western United States faced a powerful and unpredicted drought. Following 7 months of normal rainfall, the drought was one of the largest deviations from seasonal precipitation rates seen in the region since observations began in 1895.
Clouds reflect some incoming sunlight, tending to cool Earth's surface, but they also trap some heat leaving Earth's surface, causing warming.
These effects, known as cloud radiative forcing, play a key role in temperature variations on Earth's surface and thus are important for climate modeling.
However, the precise effects of cloud cover on the diurnal temperature cycle have not been well documented.
In the Amazon rainforest, the chain of events that turns a small-scale process like a localized increase in evaporation into a towering storm cloud is long and twisted.
To understand the complex dynamics that lead to precipitation, and to identify the relative importance of various processes, researchers need high temporal resolution, all-weather observations over many years.
Such observations have traditionally been scarce for tropical continental environments, such as the Amazon, where logistics are difficult.
Black carbon, also known as soot, emitted from combustion of fuels and biomass burning, absorbs solar radiation in the atmosphere and is one of the major causes of global warming, after carbon dioxide emissions.
When black carbon is deposited on snow and ice, the soot-covered snow or ice absorbs more sunlight, leading to surface warming. Due to the large amount of snow and ice in the Arctic—which has warmed twice as fast as the global average over the past century—the region is likely to be especially sensitive to black carbon.
Roughly 1,100 years ago, the Changbaishan volcano that lies along the border between northeastern China and North Korea erupted, sending pyroclastic flows dozens of kilometers and blasting a 5-kilometer (3-mile) wide chunk off of the tip of the stratovolcano.
The eruption, known as the Millennium eruption because of itsproximity to the turn of the first millennium, was one of the largest volcanic events in the Common Era. In the subsequent period, there have been three smaller eruptions, the most recent of which took place in 1903.
In the coming century, permafrost in polar regions and alpine forests in the Northern Hemisphere may thaw rapidly, potentially releasing carbon and nitrogen that could cause additional regional warming.
Permafrost occurs in soils where ground temperatures remain below freezing for at least two consecutive years. These special types of soil, called Gelisols, are large reservoirs of organic carbon and nitrogen.
How much carbon is stored in the organic soils of tropical wetlands is becoming an important question as erosion, agriculture, and global climate change slowly set into motion a series of processes that could potentially release carbon locked up in these wetlands.
In a recent study, Glaser et al. reconstructed a complete, carbon-14 dated 4,000-year history of both organic and inorganic matter accumulation in the Everglades of south Florida.
In Bermuda, red iron-rich clayey soil horizons overlying gray carbonate rocks are visually stunning topographical features. These red soils, called terra rossa, are storehouses of information not only on past local processes that crafted the topography of the island but also on atmospheric circulation patterns that drove global climate during the Quaternary period (roughly 2.5 million years ago).
The origin of the terra rossa, however, has remained a mystery for well over a century.
People are now used to long-term weather forecasts that predict what the coming winter may bring. But University of Washington researchers and federal scientists have developed the first long-term forecast of conditions that matter for Pacific Northwest fisheries.
"Being able to predict future phytoplankton blooms, ocean temperatures and low-oxygen events could help fisheries managers," said Samantha Siedlecki, a research scientist at the UW-based Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean.
The stability of the Amazon rainforest, and the ecosystem's resilience to widespread deforestation, may be much lower than previously thought.
The replacement of stands of trees with grassland changes evapotranspiration rates and atmospheric moisture convergence, which in turn reduce regional rainfall, a feedback effect that could drive further deforestation. Previous research indicated that a dramatic shift from forest to grassland could overtake the Amazon when the total deforested area hits 40 to 50 percent of the forest's current size.
An international team of researchers presents fresh evidence that confirms the existence of the superheavy chemical element 115. The experiment was conducted at the GSI Helmholtz Center for Heavy Ion Research, an accelerator laboratory located in Darmstadt. Under the lead of physicists from Lund University in Sweden, the group, which included researchers from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and the Helmholtz Institute Mainz (HIM), was able to present a way to directly identify new superheavy elements. Elements beyond atomic number 104 are referred to as superheavy elements.
Philadelphia, PA—The greater the plant density in a given area, the greater the amount of rainwater that seeps into the ground. This is due to a higher presence of dense roots and organic matter in the soil. Since water is a limited resource in many dry ecosystems, such as semi-arid environments and semi-deserts, there is a benefit to vegetation to adapt by forming closer networks with little space between plants.
Where there's wildfire, there's smoke—a lot of it. And those vast, carbon-laden clouds released by burning biomass can play a significant role in climate change.
However, not much is known about the different types of particles in wildfire smoke and how they affect climate. Now two Michigan Technological University researchers have uncovered some of their secrets. In particular, they studied an important component of smoke that has so far been absent from most models of climate change.
"We do not yet know what the possible biological function of this might be. There should be a reason for the patterns, we just have not discovered it yet", says associate professor Adam Cohen Simonsen, Department of Physics, Chemistry and Pharmacy, University of Southern Denmark.
With his colleagues Jes Dreier, Jonathan Brewer, John Hjort Ipsen and Uffe Bernchou (now Odense University Hospital) from the research group MEMPHYS at Department of Physics, Chemistry and Pharmacy at the University of Southern Denmark, he has discovered that cell membranes can form spectacular patterns.
Sea-level rise (SLR) has been isolated as a principal cause of coastal erosion in Hawaii. Differing rates of relative sea-level rise on the islands of Oahu and Maui, Hawaii remain as the best explanation for the difference in island-wide shoreline trends (that is, beach erosion or accretion) after examining other influences on shoreline change including waves, sediment supply and littoral processes, and anthropogenic changes.