Hurricane Maria was analyzed in visible and infrared light as NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP passed overhead over two days. NASA's GPM satellite also provided a look at Maria's rainfall rates.

Some great ideas are born out of years of painstaking research. Others are gleaned from the plotline of the movie "Twister."

Scientists have used satellite data to monitor underground water reserves in California’s Silicon Valley, discovering that water levels rebounded quickly after a severe drought that lasted from 2012-15.

Tropical Storm Pilar formed near the southwestern coast of Mexico on Saturday, Sept. 23 and continued hugging the coast when NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites passed overhead. Pilar weakened to a tropical depression during the late morning on Sept. 25.

A section of ice more than 100 square miles in size — four times as large as Manhattan — has broken off the Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica. It is the fifth major calving, or ice loss, event on the glacier since 2000.

The final days of August signaled summer’s end for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere. So, how did this summer compare to others?  

For the entire globe, both August and the season (June, July and August) each went down as the third warmest on record. But depending on where you live, the summer you experienced may have felt warmer or cooler than normal.    

In a detailed talk about the history and the underlying physics of hurricanes and tropical cyclones, MIT Professor Kerry Emanuel yesterday explained why climate change will cause such storms to become much stronger and reach peak intensity further north, heightening their potential impacts on human lives in coming years.

In 2008, Jay Lemery, MD, an emergency physician in Colorado, read a commentary about the effects of global climate change on human health. The author was Paul Auerbach, MD, professor of emergency medicine at Stanford and one of the world’s leading authorities on wilderness medicine.

Many extreme events — from a rogue wave that rises up from calm waters, to an  instability inside a gas turbine, to the sudden extinction of a previously hardy wildlife species — seem to occur without warning. It’s often impossible to predict when such bursts of instability will strike, particularly in systems with a complex and ever-changing mix of players and pieces.

Jose continues to bring tropical storm conditions to southern New England although the storm has become post-tropical. NASA's Terra satellite caught a view of the storm sitting almost stationary about 100 miles from Nantucket Island, Massachusetts.