• Human-Caused Warming Likely Led to Recent Streak of Record-Breaking Temperatures, New Study Finds

    It is “extremely unlikely” 2014, 2015 and 2016 would have been the warmest consecutive years on record without the influence of human-caused climate change, according to the authors of a new study.

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  • UNH Researcher Develops Innovative Way to Understand Nature of an Entire Tiny Particle

    New research from the University of New Hampshire has led to the development of a novel technique to determine the surface area and volume of small particles, the size of a grain of sand or smaller. Due to their tiny size, irregular shape and limited viewing angle, commonly used microscopic imaging techniques cannot always capture the whole object’s shape often leaving out valuable information that can be important in numerous areas of science, engineering and medicine.

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  • NASA Airborne Mission Returns to Africa to Study Smoke, Clouds

    NASA's P-3 research plane begins flights this month through both clouds and smoke over the South Atlantic Ocean to understand how tiny airborne particles called aerosols change the properties of clouds and how they influence the amount of incoming sunlight the clouds reflect or absorb.

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  • New Technique Offers Clues to Measure Ocean Deoxygenation

    The living, breathing ocean may be slowly starting to suffocate. More than two percent of the ocean’s oxygen content has been depleted during the last half century, according to reports, and marine “dead zones” continue to expand throughout the global ocean. This deoxygenation, triggered mainly by more fertilizers and wastewater flowing into the ocean, pose a serious threat to marine life and ecosystems.

    Yet despite the critical role of oxygen in the ocean, scientists haven’t had a way to measure how fast deoxygenation occurs—today, or in the past when so-called major “anoxic events” led to catastrophic extinction of marine life.

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  • Incomplete Drought Recovery May Be The New Normal

    The amount of time it takes for an ecosystem to recover from a drought is an important measure of a drought’s severity. During the 20th century, the total area of land affected by drought increased, and longer recovery times became more common, according to new research published by Nature by a group of scientists including Carnegie’s Anna Michalak and Yuanyuan Fang.

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  • RAVAN CubeSat Measures Earth's Outgoing Energy

    An experimental small satellite has successfully collected and delivered data on a key measurement for predicting changes in Earth’s climate.

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  • NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP Satellite Takes a Double Look at Tropical Storm Franklin

    When NASA-NOAA’s Suomi NPP satellite passed over Tropical Storm Franklin instruments aboard provided a night-time view of the storm’s clouds and measured their temperatures, revealing a strengthening storm.

    The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument aboard the NASA-NOAA Suomi NPP satellite captured infrared images of Franklin on August 8 at 3:58 a.m. EDT (0758 UTC). The Suomi NPP night-time image showed that Franklin’s northwestern edge had not yet reached San Francisco de Campeche or Merida, as the lights of both cities were still visible in the image. The infrared image provided temperatures of Franklin’s cloud tops, where thunderstorms surrounding the low-level center were as cold as 190 Kelvin (minus 117.7 degrees Fahrenheit / minus 83.1 degrees Celsius). NASA research has shown that storms with cloud top temperatures that cold have the ability to generate very heavy rainfall.

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  • There's Still Time to Prepare Yourself for the Apoceclipse

    For years, the total solar eclipse of August 21—the first to be visible in the mainland United States since 1979—has been in stealth mode. With the exception of the enthusiasts who’ve been snatching up all the hotel rooms along the eclipse’s 70-mile-wide, 2,800-mile-long path from Oregon to South Carolina, nobody really knew it was coming. But in the past few months, word of this spectacular natural phenomenon has spread like wildfire, and communities across the country that will be graced by the moon’s shadow are on high alert, anticipating millions of visitors.

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  • NASA's Smartest Satellite Is Gone. Can Private Space Replace It?

    Look down on Buenos Aires from the sky, and you can learn a fair bit about the city. It's got a lot of concrete. Also a lot of trees. There's a bright green river delta to the north, which probably explains the ruddy-brown bay to the east. But with the right camera—a hyperspectral one—you can pick up a whole lot more. New colors emerge, hidden hues your eyes and mine aren't wired to see. And these colors reflect even more detail about the scene: the gases coming out of the city, the health of the plants surrounding it, the species of algae coloring the water offshore.

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  • Biochar shows benefits as manure lagoon cover

    Manure is a reality in raising farm animals. Manure can be a useful fertilizer, returning valued nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium to the soil for plant growth. But manure has problems. Odor offensiveness, gas emissions, nutrient runoff, and possible water pollution are just a few.

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