Rebecca Lindsey

Global temperatures so far this year are record-warm. And aside from eastern North America, we were all in it together.

The monthly climate outlook for June favors more heat for Alaska and the West, more rain for Texas and the East.

Few things are more important to California’s water supply than the water content of the mountain snowpack at the start of the state’s warm season. In the latest round of our Climate Challenge game, experts and participants predicted the water content of the Sierra Nevada snowpack on May 1, 2015. The answer was disturbingly low.

For 800,000 years before the twentieth century, carbon dioxide levels in Earth’s atmosphere never exceeded 300 parts per million. In March 2015, the monthly average went above 400 ppm for the first time.

A new analysis suggests that in the winter following a La Niña, dryness in California often deepens into drought.  Consistent with that pattern, California’s current drought began in 2011-12, during the second year of a La Niña episode.

This pair of maps shows whether your state tends to have wet, dry, or average springs during El Niño, and how often the wet or dry pattern occurred during the last 10 El Niño years.

A major winter storm was still blustering its way through the U.S. Northeast this morning, with continued snow accumulations and high winds predicted for many areas. How will this event compare to the region’s most historic storms?