Drought is about more than lack of rainfall. A new tool keeps track of another major player: how thirsty the atmosphere is.
December wildfires scorch southern California in 2017
December 15, 2017
Now in its sixth year, a NOAA-led report published by the American Meteorological Society provides the results of more than two dozen studies of various extreme weather and climate events in 2016 and the role global warming did or didn't play in them.
NOAA scientists have released the 2017 Arctic Report Card: the complete guide to climate conditions in the planet's Far North.
Groundfish stocks in the Eastern Bering Sea are healthy at present, but a recent string of very warm summers, preceded by winters with sparse sea ice, led NOAA biologists to recommend lower catch limits for pollock—the nation's largest commercial fishery.
Paleoclimate records show that while there have been several periods over the past 1,450 years when sea ice extents expanded and contracted, the decrease during the modern era is unrivaled.
Since 1982, the rate of surface warming in some Arctic seas at the height of summer is more than quadruple the rate of warming in the global ocean.
Very old ice—thick, strong, and more melt-resistant—has nearly vanished in the Arctic. In March 2017, it made up less than 1 percent of the ice pack.