• Soil Holds Potential to Slow Global Warming, Stanford Researchers Find

    If you want to do something about global warming, look under your feet. Managed well, soil’s ability to trap carbon dioxide is potentially much greater than previously estimated, according to Stanford researchers who claim the resource could “significantly” offset increasing global emissions. They call for a reversal of federal cutbacks to related research programs to learn more about this valuable resource.

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  • Hurricane Exposes and Washes Away Thousands of Sea Turtle Nests

    Hurricane Irma took a devastating toll on incubating sea turtle nests in the Archie Carr National Wildlife Refuge, one of the most important loggerhead and green turtle nesting sites in the world, according to new estimates from the UCF Marine Turtle Research Group.

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  • NASA Satellite Finds Powerful Storms in Tropical Storm Ramon's Center

    NASA-NOAA’s Suomi NPP satellite looked at Tropical Storm Ramon in infrared light, revealing powerful storms around the center. Ramon formed close to the southwestern coast of Mexico and has already generated a tropical storm watch.

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  • In Iceland Stream, Possible Glimpse of Warming Future

    When a normally cold stream in Iceland was warmed, the make-up of life inside changed as larger organisms thrived while smaller ones struggled, according to two papers published by researchers from The University of Alabama.

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  • Climate Change Will Make for More Turbulent Flights

    Climate change will significantly increase the incidence of severe turbulence worldwide — as much as tripling it in some spots — by mid-century, resulting in much bumpier flights and a rise in costly in-flight injuries, according to a new study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

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  • Fish Shrinking as Ocean Temperatures Rise

    One of the most economically important fish is shrinking in body weight, length and overall physical size as ocean temperatures rise, according to new research by LSU Boyd Professor R. Eugene Turner published today. The average body size of Menhaden — a small, silver fish — caught off the coasts from Maine to Texas — has shrunk by about 15 percent over the past 65 years.

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  • To Predict How Climate Change Will Affect Disease, Researchers Must Fuse Climate Science and Biology

    Predicting how climate change will affect the incidence of infectious diseases would have great public health benefits. But the relationship between climate and disease is extraordinarily complex, making such predictions difficult. Simply identifying correlations and statistical associations between climatic factors and disease won’t be enough, said Princeton University researcher Jessica Metcalf. Instead, researchers need new statistical models that incorporate both climate factors and the climate–disease relationship, accounting for uncertainties in both.

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  • Winter Cold Extremes Linked to High-Altitude Polar Vortex Weakening

    When the strong winds that circle the Arctic slacken, cold polar air can escape and cause extreme winter chills in parts of the Northern hemisphere. A new study finds that these weak states have become more persistent over the past four decades and can be linked to cold winters in Russia and Europe. It is the first to show that changes in winds high up in the stratosphere substantially contributed to the observed winter cooling trend in northern Eurasia. While it is still a subject of research how the Arctic under climate change impacts the rest of the world, this study lends further support that a changing Arctic impacts the weather across large swaths of the Northern Hemisphere population centers.

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  • Fly Away Home? Ice Age May Have Clipped Bird Migration

    The onset of the last ice age may have forced some bird species to abandon their northerly migrations for thousands of years, says new research led by a University of Nebraska-Lincoln ornithologist.

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  • Gravity Waves Influence Weather and Climate

    Gravity waves form in the atmosphere as a result of destabilizing processes, for example at weather fronts, during storms or when air masses stroke over mountain ranges. They can occasionally be seen in the sky as bands of cloud. For weather forecast and climate models, however, they are mostly “invisible” due to their short wavelength. The effects of gravity waves can only be taken into consideration by including additional special components in the models. The “MS-GWaves” research unit funded by the German Research Foundation and led by Goethe University Frankfurt has meanwhile further developed such parameterizations and will test them in the second funding period.

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