News & Research Highlights

“This investment will support NOAA and its partners in better preparing Western communities for droughts in the coming years and decades.”

Eleven new projects aim to identify and better understand evolving climate risks, vulnerabilities and adaptive capacity for islands in the Caribbean and the Pacific.

The study evaluated the accuracy of four major reanalysis data sets in representing daily and extreme temperature across the United States, finding results least reliable in the mountainous western US, likely due to the complex terrain.

A new study finds nitrous oxide is accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere faster than at any other time in human history, and the gas’s current growth rate is likely unprecedented in the last 800,000 years.

A test in Greenfield, Iowa, on May 21, 2024, showed NOAA’s Warn-on-Forecast yielded strong confidence in the probability of extremely strong near-ground rotation more than an hour before the tornado touched down.

New research shows that atmospheric concentrations of a class of ozone-depleting chemicals used as refrigerants, foam blowing agents, and solvents peaked in 2021, and are now beginning to decline as nations comply with Montreal Protocol restrictions.

NOAA’s Seamless System for Prediction and EArth System Research (SPEAR) shows great skill at predicting year-to-year variability in wind energy, especially in spring over the Southern Great Plains, where more than half of the total U.S. wind capacity is located.

If the future sea surface temperature warming pattern continues to resemble the observed pattern from the past few decades rather than the model-simulated/predicted patterns, we can expect a drastically different future projection of high-impact storms, especially over the Western Hemisphere.

Our ocean and coasts are home to a diversity of life from the smallest single-celled plankton, to the largest animal on Earth, the blue whale. The ocean provides us with vital resources and plays a large role in the climate of our planet.

As a climate solution, marine carbon dioxide removal is an important pathway to achieve the broader goal for the U.S. to reach net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050.