Atmospheric
A research team, including Kent State Professor of Geology Dr. Joseph Ortiz, tracing the origin of the large carbon dioxide increase in Earth’s atmosphere at the end of the last ice age has detected two ancient "burps" that originated from the deepest parts of the southern ocean around Antarctica.
The new study showed carbon that had built up in the ocean over millennia was released in two big pulses at about 18,000 years ago and 13,000 years ago, says Dr. Thomas Marchitto of the University of Colorado at Boulder, who jointly led the study with colleague Dr. Scott Lehman.
While scientists…
A new study by NASA scientists suggests that greenhouse-gas warming may raise average summer temperatures in the eastern United States nearly 10 degrees Fahrenheit by the 2080s.
"There is the potential for extremely hot summertime temperatures in the future, especially during summers with less-than-average frequent rainfall," said lead author Barry Lynn of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University, New York.
The research found that eastern U.S. summer daily high temperatures that currently average in the low-to-mid-80s (degrees Fahrenheit) will most likely soar into…
There seems to be something new under the sun -- in the sky, specifically -- that could complicate scientists' efforts to get a fix on how much the world will warm in the future. Greenhouse gases are not the only things in the air that influence the temperature of our atmosphere. Clouds and small airborne particles called aerosols also play an important and complicated role. And now a new ingredient has been discovered: an extensive and previously unseen "twilight zone" of particles that represents a gradual transition from cloud droplets to dry particles.
In a study published last month,…
Aided by new observations from the Coupled Boundary Layer Air-Sea Transfer (CBLAST) hurricane field program, scientists at the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science have helped to develop and test a new, high-resolution computer model to better understand how air-sea interactions directly affect hurricane intensity, a factor not yet possible in the current operational forecast models.
The research, which is featured in the March 2007 issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS), explains that current predictive models used in forecasting hurricane…
If you're a communist dictatorship, the solution for pollution is simple - you ban driving.
They did just that during the Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation from Nov. 4-6, 2006 and it might be an indicator for what they will do during the 2008 Summer Olympics.
Chinese commuters make their way in heavy smog in Beijing in this December 14, 2004 file photo. REUTERS/Reinhard Krause/Files
Harvard University researchers Michael B. McElroy, Yuxuan Wang, and K. Folkert Boersma used data from the Dutch-Finnish Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) to assess the impact in more rapid fashion…
The next 11-year cycle of solar storms will most likely start next March and peak in late 2011 or mid-2012—up to a year later than expected—according to a forecast issued by the NOAA Space Environment Center in coordination with an international panel of solar experts. The NOAA Space Environment Center led the prediction panel and issued the forecast at its annual Space Weather Workshop in Boulder, Colo. NASA sponsored the panel.
Expected to start last fall, the delayed onset of Solar Cycle 24 stymied the panel and left them evenly split on whether a weak or strong period of solar storms…
The characteristics of the vegetation that inhabited Earth 21 million years ago can be vital to get to know climatic evolution in the last million years and the causes for these changes.
Samples of the sedimentary bowls of the geographic section from the south of Spain to Turkey give researchers cause to theorize that 14 million years ago there were glaciations in the south pole that changed the ruling subtropical climate into warm and transformed the characteristic vegetation of this area.
A result that can be "vitally important to determine if the present climatic change is due to a…
Climate model simulations for the 21st century indicate a robust increase in wind shear in the tropical Atlantic due to global warming, which may inhibit hurricane development and intensification. Historically, increased wind shear has been associated with reduced hurricane activity and intensity. This new finding is reported in a study by scientists at the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science at the University of Miami and NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) in Princeton, N.J.
Warmer oceans feed storms, yet increased wind shear is able to also impair their…
New calculations show that sensitivity of Earth's climate to changes in the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) has been consistent for the last 420 million years, according to an article in Nature by geologists at Yale and Wesleyan Universities.
A popular predictor of future climate sensitivity is the change in global temperature produced by each doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere. This study confirms that in the Earth's past 420 million years, each doubling of atmospheric CO2 translates to an average global temperature increase of about 3° Celsius, or 5° Fahrenheit.
According to the…
Scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory - Stennis Space Center (NRL-SSC) have directly derived the air-sea momentum exchange at the ocean interface using observed ocean currents under Hurricane Ivan and determined that it decreases when winds exceed 32 meters per second. This is the first time that momentum exchange at the air-sea interface has been directly calculated from ocean current observations under extreme winds generated by a major tropical cyclone. The complete findings of this study titled "Bottom-up Determination of Air-Sea Momentum Exchange Under a Major Tropical Cyclone,"…