Imagine driving down a busy highway in winter: The weather is clear and you are going the speed limit.Suddenly, traffic is enveloped by white-out conditions with little to no visibility and strong, gusty winds. As you slow down, you see a chain-reaction of vehicles swerving, colliding into each other in the distance like amusement park bumper cars.

Lucky for you, you just survived a snow squall.

The Great Lakes will have a network of well-equipped guardians thanks to a plan hatched by a UWindsor researcher with funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation and Ontario’s Ministry of Research, Innovation and Science and Ministry of Economic Development and Growth.

Aaron Fisk and his nine collaborators will receive $15.9 million for the Real-time Aquatic Ecosystem Observation Network (RAEON), a collaborative research project which will provide infrastructure and data management for Canadian scientists to carry-out cutting-edge research on freshwater ecosystems.

University of Adelaide scientists have demonstrated how climate change can drive the collapse of marine “food webs”.

NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Tropical Cyclone Irving and found wind shear was stretching the storm out.

NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite passed over the Southern Indian Ocean and captured a visible image of Tropical Cyclone Ava as it continued to move away from southeastern Madagascar and weaken.

2017 will be remembered as a year of extremes for the U.S. as floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, drought, fires and freezes claimed hundreds of lives and visited economic hardship upon the nation. Recovery from the ravages of three major Atlantic hurricanes making landfall in the U.S. and an extreme and ongoing wildfire season in the West is expected to continue well into the new year.

On Jan. 8, Tropical Cyclone Irving was hurricane-force in the Southern Indian Ocean. The Global Precipitation Measurement Mission or GPM core satellite passed overhead and measured cloud heights and rainfall rates in the powerful storm.

NASA's Terra satellite passed over Tropical Cyclone Ava as it continued moving away from the island nation of Madagascar. Ava was located in the Southern Indian Ocean, off the southeastern coast of the country.

A new study published Jan. 8 in the journal Nature Geoscience reveals that strong El Niño events can cause significant ice loss in some Antarctic ice shelves while the opposite may occur during strong La Niña events.

Methane hydrates, also known as flammable ice, occur in many regions of the oceans. But only under high pressure and cold temperatures the product of methane and water forms a solid compound. If the pressure is too low or the temperature is too high, the hydrates decompose, and the methane is released as gas from the sea floor into the water column. Spitsbergen has been experiencing severe outgassing for several years. Does the methane originate from decomposed methane hydrates? What is the cause of the dissociation of the hydrates? Warming due to climate change or other, natural processes? An international team of scientists has now been able to answer this question, which has been published in the international journal Nature Communications.