Heat and lots of rainfall, thanks in part to Hurricane Florence, were the key factors in last month’s ranking as fourth hottest and third wettest September on record for the contiguous United States.

Polar bears likely survived past warm periods in the Arctic, when sea ice cover was low, by scavenging on the carcasses of stranded large whales. This food source sustained the bears when they were largely restricted to land, unable to roam the ice in search of seals to hunt.

As Hurricane Michael barrels toward the U.S. states along the northwestern Gulf of Mexico, and Tropical Storm Leslie lingers in the Central Atlantic, Tropical Storm Nadine has formed off the west coast of Africa in the far eastern Atlantic. NASA-NOAA’s Suomi NPP satellite provided a visible image of the new named storm.

Satellite images revealing an Arctic ice cap destabilizing at “unexpected and unprecedented” speed have scientists questioning the long-term stability of some of the Earth’s polar ice caps.

NASA’s Aqua satellite peered into Hurricane Sergio with infrared light to determine if the storm was intensifying or weakening. Infrared data showed cloud top temperatures were getting warmer on the western half of the storm, indicating the uplift of air in storms had weakened.

The world is losing trees faster than ever. An area the size of Italy disappeared last year. Or did it? New research suggests three-quarters of those lost forests may already be regrowing. That hardly means we are out of the woods. Fighting climate change and protecting biodiversity still needs a global campaign to reforest the planet. But it does suggest that, given the chance, nature will do much of the work.

Over the course of a month, we’ve seen tropical cyclone activity in the Atlantic basin heat up quite a bit – most notably with the landfall of Hurricane Florence, which dumped historic amounts of rain on portions of the Carolinas.

The floodwaters that covered wide swaths of the Carolinas’ coastal plain are finally receding, more than two weeks after Hurricane Florence made landfall Sept. 14 near Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, and U.S. Geological Survey hydrographers are moving in rapidly to the areas where the flooding lingered longest.

Hurricane Sergio continued to look impressive on satellite imagery when NOAA’s GOES-West satellite viewed the storm in infrared light.

The Global Precipitation Measurement mission or GPM core satellite passed over Tropical Storm Kong-Rey and analyzed the rates in which rain was falling throughout the storm.