News & Research Highlights

For the last seven years, NOAA has helped citizens in more than 70 U.S. communities map their hottest neighborhoods. Earlier this year, NOAA branched into the wider world to support two heat island mapping campaigns overseas, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Freetown, Sierra Leone.

NOAA is improving hurricane forecasts in five ways: developing of NOAA’s next-generation tropical cyclone model, collocating ocean observing instruments, improving small uncrewed aircraft systems, developing new instruments, and flying aircraft further east to study how storms begin.

Bubbles bursting at the ocean surface are an important source of sea spray aerosols. They contribute to atmospheric aerosols and play a crucial role in radiative and cloud processes. Uncertainties related to the large range of scales involved, and the complexity of the processes, leads to open questions about the dependencies on wind speed, ocean wave properties and water temperature.

Studies have shown a significant shift in the distribution of sea surface temperatures due to climate change, with serious implications for marine ecosystems. Scientists must now distinguish between extreme marine heatwave conditions derived from long-term historical data and extremes that account for the new, higher average temperatures.

Formaldehyde, an atmospheric trace gas, results from oxidation reactions involving harmful compounds from transportation, industry, and organic solvents. Formaldehyde is also a carcinogen. Satellites have tracked this gas since the 1990s, but how accurate are the newer satellites?

The Dungeness crab fishery industry is one of the largest on the West Coast. In a new paper, authors develop a model for Dungeness crab catch per unit effort to inform dynamic management decisions in Oregon and Washington.

Greenhouse gas pollution from human activity trapped 49 percent more heat in the atmosphere during 2022 than those same gases did in 1990, according to NOAA’s Annual Greenhouse Gas Index (AGGI).

Marine heatwave research has primarily focused on sea surface temperature extremes. While surface marine heat waves can have dramatic impacts on marine ecosystems, extreme warming along the seafloor can also have significant biological outcomes.

A challenge for climate models is representing how wind direction veers at different heights as a result of friction at Earth’s surface, or “wind-turning.” A new study evaluates eight models to see how accurately they estimate wind-turning angles compared to observations.

In the thrall of a 22-year megadrought, the record snowpack in southwestern Colorado was a welcome break. When scientists installed a state-of-the-art observing network in the East River watershed in the fall of 2021, they couldn’t have imagined a year like this.