While heat is stored and mixed throughout the depth of the ocean, it is the temperature at the surface—where the ocean is in direct contact with the atmosphere—that plays a significant role in weather and short-term climate.

For many New Jersey residents and businesses, "resilience" means recovering from storms like last fall's Sandy. Lisa Auermiller with the Jacques Cousteau National Estuarine Research Reserve talks about the factors that spur people to take a longer-term view.

At various locations on New Jersey's Barnegat Bay Island, Norb Psuty talks with Climate.gov about how humans' desire for permanence on barrier islands is at odds with natural processes. But preserving or restoring key dune and beach features can help communities weather some storms.

Why do global climate models behave like they do? The Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) panel—a subcommittee of the World Climate Research Programme—designs experiments to evaluate differen ...

Ron Stouffer and Gabriel Vecchi of NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, N.J., share their experiences working on one of the most comprehensive scientific documents in history.

In brief. A huge swath of the contiguous United States has a heightened chance of experiencing well above normal temperatures during October, according to NOAA's Climate Prediction Center. More specif ...

To be consistent with NOAA's use of 30-year periods for the official "climate normals," the National Snow and Ice Data Center switched its baseline period for sea ice analyses from 1979-2000 to 1981-2010.  Compared to the new normal, the low ice conditions of the recent past will appear less abnormal than they used to.

Maps of the thousands of storms that have passed through the Eastern Hemisphere tropical oceans in the past century or so reveal a more crowded landscape than similar maps of the Western Hemisphere. Unlike the Western Hemisphere, where storms are mostly confined to areas north of the equator, the Eastern Hemisphere sees storms in both north and south tropical waters.

Through the first week of September 2013, Colorado was exceptionally warm and dry. By September 12, everything had changed.

Each fall forecasters spend a couple months re-hashing the season, assessing how well the outlook matched the season as a whole, and trying to isolate any new climate factors that could help them better forecast seasonal activity. Only when the season is complete can they determine if the unusual August weather had a significant impact on the overall hurricane season.