Thousands of barrels of oil have been tarring Brazil’s beaches since September, and no one knows why. An oil spill scientist is running oil forensics to find out.
Modeling
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Earthquake Statistics Vary with Fault Size
A theoretical study explores why small earthquake sources can produce quasiperiodic sequences of identical events, whereas earthquakes on large faults are intrinsically more variable.
Posted inNews
Jupiter’s Galilean Moons May Have Formed Slowly
A new model is the first to simultaneously explain many of the moons’ characteristics, including their mass, orbits, and icy composition
Posted inNews
Nuclear Winter May Bring a Decade of Destruction
New climate models present a grim prediction of what would happen worldwide after a nuclear war between the United States and Russia.
Posted inNews
Artificial Intelligence May Help Predict El Niño
Deep learning techniques give scientists the longest–lead time forecasts yet.
Posted inEditors' Vox
Atmospheric Model Hierarchies: Connecting Theory and Models
Model hierarchies are fundamental to how we model Earth’s climate, allowing us to apply our theoretical understanding, connect simple ideas to the real atmosphere, and test new hypotheses.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
A “Super” Solution for Modeling Clouds
Climate models struggle to accurately portray clouds because the models cannot resolve the scales at which clouds form. A new study demonstrates a potential fix for the problem.
Posted inEditors' Highlights
Reconstructing Natural Streamflow at Unprecedented Resolution
A new research effort has mapped 35 years of naturalized streamflow for 2.94 million river reaches worldwide: an invaluable dataset for hydrology, biogeochemistry, ecology, and remote sensing.
Posted inEditors' Highlights
Tropical Forests May Have More Canopy Than Previously Thought
A rare attempt to directly estimate leaf area in a tropical African broadleaved forest suggests that there may be more tree foliage than previously estimated.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
How the Ocean’s “Shadow Zone” Breathes
A new study uses Argo floats and an ocean circulation model to track the sources supplying pulses of oxygen to the deep North Pacific.