Tropical Cyclone Marcus has developed off the coast of Australia’s Northern Territory along the Cobourg Peninsula coast. NASA’s Aqua satellite provided a view of the new storm from its orbit in space.

As climate change increases the risk to trees from severe storms, insects, diseases, drought and fire, a Rutgers University study highlights the need for improved safety in tree-care operations.

A difference of just half a degree of global warming, from 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius, would mean that an additional 5 million people worldwide will have the land where their homes are located be permanently submerged underwater, according to a new study published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

On a rainy day in New Orleans, people file into a beige one-story building on Jefferson Davis Parkway to sign up for the Low-Income Heating and Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), a federal grant that helps people keep up with their utility bills. New Orleans has one of the highest energy burdens in the country, meaning that people must dedicate a large portion of their income to their monthly energy bills. This is due in part to it being one of the least energy-efficient cities in the country.

On the seafloor of the shallow coastal regions north of Siberia, microorganisms produce methane when they break down plant remains. If this greenhouse gas finds its way into the water, it can also become trapped in the sea ice that forms in these coastal waters. As a result, the gas can be transported thousands of kilometres across the Arctic Ocean and released in a completely different region months later. This phenomenon is the subject of an article by researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute, published in the current issue of the online journal Scientific Reports. Although this interaction between methane, ocean and ice has a significant influence on climate change, to date it has not been reflected in climate models.

Spurred on by climate change, international travel and international trade, disease-bearing insects are spreading to ever-wider parts of the world.

This means that more humans are exposed to viral infections such as Dengue fever, Chikungunya, Zika, West Nile fever, Yellow fever and Tick-borne encephalitis.

For many of these diseases, there are as yet no specific antiviral agents or vaccines.

New research from UBC’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries suggests that larger reef areas may help protect the Caribbean’s coral reef fish communities from the impacts of ocean warming.

Geologists are today anticipating a rise in ocean levels of between 80 and 180 centimetres by 2100. But to fine-tune this prediction and upgrade the models underpinning it, we need to know about the recent past in greater detail – on a scale of a few thousand years instead of the millions of years that geologists usually work with. This tour de force was achieved by an international team of researchers that included the University of Geneva (UNIGE). The scientists succeeded in reconstructing the sea-level curve over the last 6,000 years in French Polynesia with unmatched accuracy: to within one centimetre. The research, which is based on analysing coral microatolls, is published in Nature Communications.

NASA got an inside look at the heavy rainfall within developing Tropical cyclone Eliakim. The new tropical cyclone that may affect Madagascar in a few days has been generating an impressive rate of rain.

Over the past decades, Beijing, the capital city of China, has encountered increasingly frequent persistent haze events (PHEs). Severe PHEs not only lead to a sharp decrease in visibility, causing traffic hazards and disruptions, and, hence, affecting economic activities, but also induce serious health problems such as respiratory illnesses and heart disease. While the increased pollutant emissions serve as the most important reason, changes in regional atmospheric circulation associated with large-scale climate warming are found to play a role as well.