Every year hundreds of scientists from scores of countries team up to give the Earth's climate a comprehensive physical. Edited by NOAA scientists and published by the American Meteorological Society, the State of the Climate in 2015 draws on tens of thousands of observations of everything from forest fires to fish migration to catalog climate variability and change.
CarbonTracker is a tool for modelling sources and sinks of carbon dioxide. Users can download the code, carbon dioxide data, and the tool's carbon flux estimates to conduct their own analyses or to help improve the system.
It’s only when we “zoom out” to the planet-wide scale that trends in surface temperature are obvious: despite a few, rare areas experiencing cooling, the vast majority of places across the globe are warming.
(VIDEO) Visualizing data makes it easier to understand exactly how an extreme weather event affected people’s lives, livelihoods, and property and how those things could be affected in the future. Knowing how to access and analyze the wide variety of datasets needed to study those events can be a challenge, however. NOAA's Weather and Climate Toolkit makes the job easier.
Climate change is a global phenomenon, affecting weather events around the world. Therefore, people around the globe need climate information to anticipate potentially damaging floods, droughts, crop and pest conditions, and disease outbreaks. For 20 years, the scientists at the International Desks of NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center have provided climate outlooks for weeks and months into the future and trained visiting meteorologists to translate climate data into information that can help decision makers in different parts of the world.
If mid-century projections of sea level rise prove true for New York City, four times as many people may be living in the 100-year floodplain than were previously estimated based only on observed changes.
In October 2003, a little-known think tank in the Department of Defense quietly released a report warning that climate change could happen so suddenly it could pose a major threat to our country's national security. Why was the Pentagon worried about abrupt climate change? Because new evidence from Greenland showed it had happened before.
According to the 2009 National Climate Assessment, heavy downpours have increased in frequency and intensity during the last 50 years. Models predict that downpours will become still more more frequent and intense as greenhouse gas emissions and the planet’s temperature continue to rise.
The most likely explanation for the lack of significant warming at the Earth’s surface in the past decade or so is that natural climate cycles caused shifts in ocean circulation patterns that moved some excess heat into the deep ocean.