By Dr. Jeff Masters7 July 2012 The extraordinary heat wave of late June/early July 2012 toppled more Dust Bowl-era records on Friday, with three cities in Michigan hitting their hottest temperatures ever recorded. Lansing hit 103°, the hottest day in Michigan’s capital city since record keeping began in 1863. Lansing has hit 102° four times, […]
By Miguel Llanos, msnbc.com5 July 2012 Coral reefs along Panama’s Pacific coast completely collapsed for 2,500 years due to natural climate cycles, researchers reported in a study Thursday, adding that there’s a lesson in the data for man-made climate change: ease up on greenhouse gasses and reefs will restore themselves. “We can prevent coral reefs […]
3 July 2012 (Spiegel) – The high-altitude landscape of the Bavarian Alps is prized by mountain sports lovers around the world, but it could change significantly in the coming years. Temperatures in the region are rising at an above-average rate, which will likely melt most of the glaciers there within the next 20 to 30 […]
By Vanessa Ko, Harmeet Singh and Sara Sidner, CNN4 July 2012 (CNN) – Flooding described by India’s prime minister as the worst in recent times, has left at least 95 people dead and almost 2 million others homeless in the country’s remote Assam state. The Brahmaputra river overflowed during monsoon rains over the past week, […]
By Kate Galbraith3 July 2012 The historic Texas drought caused the Ogallala Aquifer to experience its largest decline in 25 years across a large swath of the Texas Panhandle, new numbers from a water district show. The 16-county High Plains Underground Water Conservation District reported this week that its monitoring wells showed an average decline […]
Washington, D.C. area before derecho, 28 June 2012 Washington, D.C. area after derecho, 30 June 2012 Caption by Aries Keck4 July 2012 These before and after images from NASA’s Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite show the power outages in the clear skies over Washington, DC and Baltimore that occurred as a result of a […]
Satellite data of Greenland reflectivity 1-22 June 2012 versus the same periods in previous Junes back to 2000. The blue colors indicate a decrease in reflectivity compared to previous Junes. In a new study, Box and a team of researchers describe the decline in ice sheet reflectivity and the reasons behind it, noting that if […]
By Laura Betz, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center11 June 2012 Fires burning in Siberia recently sent smoke across the Pacific Ocean and into the U.S. and Canada. Images of data taken by the nation’s newest Earth-observing satellite tracked aerosols from the fires taking six days to reach America’s shores. Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (S-NPP) satellite’s […]
By David Zucchino3 July 2012 Scientists with a state commission in North Carolina will not be permitted to issue formal predictions of sea level rise based on climate change – at least for the next four years. After enduring national ridicule for proposing a bill to outlaw any coastal sea level projections based on climate […]
4 July 2012 (MSNBC) – In the aftermath of violent storms that knocked out power to millions from the Midwest to the Mid-Atlantic, sweltering residents and elected officials are demanding to know why it’s taking so long to restring power lines and why they’re not more resilient in the first place. The answer, it turns […]