warmer than the global surface temperature in neighboring years. Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are forcing a long-term trend, so climatologists compare these highs and lows to an average that is ...

and Central Drought / Heat Wave ($22.1 billion). Adding the 2022 events to the record that began in 1980, the U. S. has sustained 341 weather and climate disasters with the overall damage costs reachi ...

the scientists chose two drought events from the historical record—the megadrought that began in 2000 and the extreme single-year drought of 2002—and used them as test cases for what droughts like tho ...

moves very quickly through concepts such heat capacity of the ocean, capacity of the atmosphere to absorb water vapor as temperature increases, and NASA visualizations of changes in ocean surface temp ...

with the fact that warmer air temperatures fuel more evaporation, which leads to a wetter atmosphere. Scientists have measured a significant increase in specific humidity (the volume of water vapor) o ...

the peak of summer and winter because the ocean is slower to warm up and cool down than the atmosphere. The animation above shows changes in the yearly cycle of Arctic sea ice extent from 1979 (the fi ...

larger the difference from the long-term average. Warmer-than-average sea surface temperatures in the eastern tropical Pacific are one of the indicators of El Niño: the warm phase of a major climate p ...

that across nearly all of the country east of the Rocky Mountains, the average overnight low in July will be above 60 degrees by the end of the century. In many parts of the Southern Plains and around ...

course. Phytoplankton are decaying, and the amount of carbon dioxide in the ocean versus the atmosphere is more balanced (white). Tracking the growth and decay of the phytoplankton is important for st ...

when it was warmer-than-average. In cool Gulf summers, the amount of energy present in the atmosphere to fuel convection and tornadoes—a key severe weather ingredient, which weather experts call "CAPE ...