News & Research Highlights

Global warming will change Alaska’s precipitation. A new study projects changes in all warming scenarios, with the increases in both temperature and precipitation.

NOAA and community partners will map heat inequities in 14 communities across the United States, and two international cities during the summer of 2022.

Evaporative demand is the amount of water that the atmosphere can absorb from the planet’s surface—atmospheric thirst. When it rises, so does the risk of drought and wildfire. A new study has found increases in evaporative demand across most of the contiguous United States, especially in the Rio Grande and Lower Colorado River basins.

NOAA has released the first report in a monograph series on climate adaptation, titled “Our Changing Precipitation: A Conversation on the Science of Precipitation and Planning for the Future.” The report synthesizes information, experiences, and lessons learned.

For the first time, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has included a comparison of NOAA’s atmospheric emission estimates of four hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) to its own inventory-based estimates. The information is available in the just-released “U.S. Inventory of Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks.”

Ocean waters can acidify by absorbing anthorpogenic carbon emissions, and Arctic regions are particularly vulnerable to rapid pH changes. A new study shows that unsupervised machine learning can identify distinct clusters of surface acidification in the Arctic.

New research has shown the presence of solid organic-coated ammonium sulfate particles in the Arctic boundary layer. The particles, which should have been liquid, were solid. Solid aerosols have the potential to change how clouds form. With a loss of Arctic sea ice, researchers expect to see more particles affecting clouds and climate.

The same processes that emit carbon dioxide often emit pollutants that harm air quality: nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides, carbon monoxide, and particulate matter. A new study finds that carbon-mitigation policies that don’t account for co-emitted pollutants may worsen air quality and raise mortality rates.

By examining “humid heat,” wet-bulb temperature more accurately assesses the human health effects of heat than measurements of temperature alone. A new study finds that wet-bulb temperatures increased in most land regions over 1979–2019.

NOAA postdoc Nastassia Patin recounts her journey aboard a French schooner in January and February 2022. The mission’s goal was to characterize, quantify, and model Atlantic Ocean ecosystems.