News & Research Highlights

A new study accounting for the simultaneous effects of fires, water stress, and plant competition suggests that up to 40 percent of Amazon forests may begin to convert to savanna before mid-century under high greenhouse gas emission scenarios.

Scientists at NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center — a division of the National Weather Service — have increased their prediction for the ongoing 2023 Atlantic hurricane season from a near-normal level of activity to an above-normal level of activity.

A new study captures a snapshot of two decades of global interior ocean measurements, and the study demonstrates that the ocean’s role as a carbon sink and its ability to store anthropogenic carbon may be weakening.

A new article explains how to use climate data and projections to plan for climate change. The publication applies to any location, with examples specific to Nevada.

Cape Town, South Africa, was one of the world’s first major cities to nearly run out of water, in 2018. A new study examines how changes in the Agulhas Current may affect future South African rainfall.

Scientists from NOAA, NASA and 21 universities from three countries are deploying state-of-the-art instruments in multiple, coordinated research campaigns to investigate how air pollution sources have shifted over recent decades.

A new study compared wind data alongside Sargassum Inundation Risk (SIR) maps against citizen science reports from the coasts of Florida, Gulf of Mexico, Bahamas, and Caribbean regions. The study found that including shoreward wind velocity greatly improves the agreement with coastal observations of Sargassum beaching compared to SIR indicators alone.

Accurate hurricane track and intensity forecasts are crucial for early preparation, but hurricane models have trade offs. High-resolution models improve hurricane intensity prediction than low-resolution models, but the high-resolution models are more prone to errors.

A new fire emissions inventory, providing publicly available data on trace gases and aerosols from global fires for the years 2002 through 2021, add improvements to previous inventory.

For over 20 years, a fleet of almost 4,000 Argo floats have measured ocean temperature and salinity across the globe. The eventual plan calls for floats to be evenly spaced across the global oceans, but a new study examines whether uniform spacing is the most effective float configuration.