If this blog teaches you one thing, we want it to be this: "polar vortex" is not a synonym for "cold snap."

An explainer about the international climate meeting known as “COP.”

Was the late November Great Lakes snowstorm a harbinger for December?

Summary: The City of Mandeville, located in St. Tammany Parish, decided to commit to helping residents escape troublesome flood waters. Finally tiring of the constant issue of a repeated damage-repair cycle, city officials decided to act by adopting high regulatory standards for the elevation of homes and businesses.

Watch this space! Next week, in partnership with experts from NOAA Chemical Sciences Lab and the Climate Prediction Center, we're launching a blog about the behavior—and sometimes misbehavior—of the stratospheric polar vortex.

It's not perfect, but ENSO is still the best tool we have for predicting average winter precipitation over the U.S.

Summary: Addressing climate issues takes a trusted leader who knows how to get things done in their community—a climate champion.  An effective champion, whether inside government or a member of the community at large, works with a planning team to assess climate risk and make recommendations on how to address it. Learn more about the Steps to Resilience »

Earth’s hottest periods occurred before humans existed. Those ancient climates would have been like nothing our species has ever seen.

This study reveals the potentially dominant role of anthropogenic forcing on coastal cyclone changes around the US Atlantic coast, Hawaii region, Northeast Asian coast near Japan and Korea, South China Sea, western coast of the Arabian Sea, and Madagascar.

For engineers and scientists, sometimes failure means progress. When developing a new technology, the process is to field test, fail, tweak, and test again, each time failing a little less and learning what does and does not work until–finally–they get it right.