News & Features

The dynamics that lift smoke from large wildfires into the upper atmosphere could potentially be employed one day to help temporarily cool the planet, based on the findings of a modeling study led by NOAA scientists.

A new modeling study led by NOAA researchers highlights the challenges and potential consequences of solar geoengineering actions large enough to ward off extreme warming by the end of the 21st century. The study simulates the injection of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to counter carbon dioxide emissions. The study finds that sulfur dioxide injections of up to 50 million metric tons per year would be needed to keep temperatures from rising.

In recent decades, the Northern Hemisphere has featured a “Warm Arctic, Cold Continents” (WACC) pattern: warming and rapid sea ice loss of the Arctic, and frequent cold, harsh winters over Eurasia and central North America. A new study, funded in part by CPO’s Climate Variability and Predictability (CVP) program, investigates the drivers of year-to-year variability in the WACC.

A new study supported by NOAA Climate Program Office’s Climate Variability and Predictability (CVP) program, led by CIRES and the University of Colorado Boulder, uses maps built with machine learning to identify large-scale atmospheric patterns that are linked with the start of seasonal sea ice melt in the Arctic.

NOAA’s HYSPLIT (Hybrid Single-Particle Lagrangian Integrated Trajectory) atmospheric dispersion model now integrates features from a widely used greenhouse gas emissions model, thanks to a competitive grant project.

A newly released report, “The State of Climate Knowledge 2021,” outlines New York City’s climate research priorities, and identifies knowledge gaps for future study. NOAA’s Consortium for Climate Risk in the Urban Northeast (CCRUN) coauthored the report.

Although the West Coast continental shelf has long been known to host methane bubble streams, scientists used to think those streams were rare. A new study in Frontiers of Earth Science suggests there are more than 1,300 emission sites between California and Canada.

Piecing together Earth’s climate history, tracking marine heat waves, and sharing weather and climate modeling code are just a few of the ways NOAA scientists advanced understanding of the Earth system in 2020.

“Blue carbon” is carbon dioxide that the world’s ocean ecosystems remove from the atmosphere, through algae, mangroves, and other means. CPO has developed a briefing sheet for the newly launched NOAA Blue Carbon Inventory (BCI) Project you can review to learn more.

Forest Service personnel have turned to NOAA’s Climate Explorer tool for projections of future climate conditions. Available from the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit, the tool provides climate projections for every county in the contiguous United States.