News & Research Highlights

A new Climate Justice webinar is scheduled for February 3, 2023, at 1 p.m. CST. Led by SCIPP’s Dr. Simone Domingue, the purpose of this webinar series is to support socially-just climate adaptation that builds community resilience to coupled environmental and economic stressors and disasters.

The South Atlantic Ocean is the only ocean basin that transports heat towards the equator instead of the poles . It transfers vast amounts of Pacific and Indian Ocean waters to the North Atlantic. New research shows the South Atlantic Ocean has warmed from its surface to the deep ocean, upper ocean salinity has increased, and intermediate, deep water masses are freshening.

Antarctic sea ice has experienced a string of negative extent anomalies over the last several years. A new study finds the atmosphere might play a larger role that these negative anomalies than the subsurface Southern Ocean. Still, the ocean plays a critical role in the persistence of low sea ice extent.

Though climate change is a global public health crisis, most doctors and public health professionals do not receive the education necessary to effectively communicate climate change-related health impacts to their patients. Between July 2021 and February 2022, a new program delivered 22 weekly telementoring sessions for healthcare professionals.

A NOAA co-investigator contributed to the new publication “Stories as data: Indigenous research sovereignty and the ‘Intentional Fire’ podcast,” which is now available online.

With extreme heat events growing in intensity, frequency, and duration, cities need heat adaptation strategies to improve public health and social equity. City-Heat Equity Adaptation tool (City-HEAT) is a new adaptation tool to support planning.

On February 13, 2023, The Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy (ACCAP)will host a webinar titled “Arctic Report Card: Background and Key Findings.”

Sparse and inconsistent coverage of ocean observations makes analysis of climate impacts on ocean physics and marine ecosystems challenging. A new study compares the skills of three high-resolution reanalyses.

A new United Nations report confirms that the recovery of Earth’s protective ozone layer is on track, and that the Montreal Protocol, the international treaty that guides the phase-out of ozone-destroying chemicals, has had the additional benefit of slowing global warming.

Floods and landslides along the U.S. West Coast in January 2023 have happened thanks to an atmospheric river. Satellites can easily spot these rivers over the ocean, observing their structure is harder over land. So NOAA has developed on-the-ground atmospheric river observatories.