A new model accurately reproduces aspects of polar vortex behavior, extracting indicators of imminent vortex collapse and accompanying frigid weather in North America and Europe.
extreme weather
Posted inResearch Spotlights
The Ambiguous Costs of Climate Change
To put a price tag on climate change, some approaches focus on whether it made an event more likely, whereas others focus on whether it made an event more severe and damaging. A new study examines the validity of both approaches.
Posted inFeatures
The Effects of Polar Night and Day on Arctic Air Masses
Cold air outbreaks and warm air intrusions link Arctic and midlatitude weather and climate. But a lack of data on these events, especially in winter, limits our understanding.
Posted inEditors' Vox
Decoding the Origins of Lightning’s Violent Currents
A compact set of physical equations delivers a unified, first-principles explanation for how lightning’s most destructive surge of current is born, races towards the clouds, and fades.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Extreme Heat May Drive Asthma Risk in Baltimore, Especially at Night
A new study paints a fuller picture of how heat affects respiratory health, especially in Baltimore’s socially vulnerable neighborhoods.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Many Americans Underestimate Health Risks of Extreme Weather, New Study Finds
The research examines the “risk perception gap,” or the difference between climate-related mortality estimates and public perceptions of climate risk, across U.S. counties.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
How Does Social Vulnerability Evolve After a Tropical Cyclone?
An initial rise in the social vulnerability index is followed by a decrease, but that decrease comes with a catch.
Posted inResearch & Developments
Climate Change Made Spain Wildfires At Least 20 Times More Likely
Over the past two weeks, large wildfires in southwestern France and central Spain have burned 255,000 hectares, displaced hundreds of thousands of people, and created extremely poor air quality even hundreds of kilometers away. Though firefighters have now contained the major fires, a forecasted heat wave and windy weather are threatening to worsen the situation.
Climate change played a role in creating the conditions for these fires to burn and spread, a new analysis has found.
Posted inNews
What Drives Derechos? The First Derecho Archive Could Help Meteorologists Figure It Out.
Researchers can now use 70 years of data to examine the conditions that create these destructive windstorms.
Posted inResearch & Developments
We’re Getting Better at Knowing When Climate Change Is to Blame, National Academies Report Says
Scientists have gotten much better at parsing how severe events are linked to climate change, a long-awaited report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine has found.
The report was developed by 14 experts (including climatologists, meteorologists, and atmospheric scientists) and updates a 2016 report on the same subject. That report found that climate change was partly responsible for worsening heat waves, cold events, droughts, and heavy precipitation events, but that improvements to attribution science—a branch of climate science that aims to determine the extent to which individual extreme weather events are caused by climate change—were needed.