News & Features

A checkerboard of drought conditions has developed across the United States east of the Rockies between spring and summer 2016. Since March, the total drought-affected area of the country has nearly doubled.

A CPO-funded study published in Geophysical Research Letters concluded that although tropical Pacific sea surface temperatures hit a record high during the 2015-2016 El Niño, impacts to marine ... ...

California’s supply of groundwater is heavily affected by drought, which is in turn affected by ENSO. Our guest blogger discusses some of these complex relationships.

In 2015, glaciers across the globe, on average, continued to shrink for the 36th consecutive year.

2015 was a tough year for vegetation, both natural and agricultural, with a near-record area of global land surfaces in some state of drought.

The global mean sea level in 2015 was approximately 7 centimeters (2.7 inches) above the 1993 average, making it the highest observed since the satellite altimeter record began in 1993. Regional variations highlighted the short-term influence of climate phenomena like the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the largest El Niño event since 1997/98.

Long-term warming and a strong El Niño contributed to the highest annual combined temperature for ocean and land since reliable records began in the mid-to-late 1800s.

Ocean heat storage has increased substantially since 1993, hitting a record high in 2015, according to the State of the Climate in 2015 report. Ocean warming accounts for over 90% of the warming in Earth’s climate system.

Globally, 2015 set a new record for the most extremely warm days in the 66-year record (1.8 times more than the average). The number of extremely warm days and nights was the highest ever recorded in western North America, parts of central Europe, and central Asia.

Using measurements taken worldwide, scientists estimated that 2015’s global average carbon dioxide concentration was 399.4 parts per million (ppm), a new record high. At Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawai’i, where atmospheric carbon dioxide has been recorded longer than anywhere else in the world, the annual average carbon dioxide concentration was 400.8—also a new record, and a new milestone.