Atlantic hurricane season officially begins on June 1—and a disturbance in the Gulf of Mexico is already brewing. Tropical wave Invest 91-L only now has a 70 percent chance of becoming the first named system of the 2023 Atlantic hurricane season—Arlene—but it will likely bring downpours and gusty thunderstorms to parts of Florida by the end of the work week whether or not it becomes a named storm.

[Related: What hurricane categories mean, and why we use them.]

For the 2023 season, NOAA forecasts a pretty average amount of hurricane activity. In their annual outlook, NOAA predicts a 40 percent chance of a “near-normal season”, a 30 percent chance of an “above-normal season”, and a 30 percent chance of a “below-normal season”. 

The forecast calls for 12 to 17 total named storms—those with winds of 39 MPH or higher. NOAA anticipates that five to nine of these storms could become hurricanes (winds of 74 MPH or higher), including one to four major hurricanes. Major hurricanes are category 3, 4, or 5 storms with 111 MPH winds or higher.

Some of the names for this year’s storms include Cindy, Harold, and Sean among others.

The 2023 season is anticipated to be less active than recent years, partially due to a tug-of-war between some factors that suppress storm development and some that fuel it. This is the first year in three years without a La Niña pattern present, and the latest forecasts say there is a 90 percent likelihood that El Niño will develop by August and then remain strong in the fall. 

El Niño’s influence on storm development may be offset by favorable conditions in the tropical Atlantic Basin. Those conditions include a potentially above-normal West African monsoon that helps create some of the Atlantic’s stronger and longer-lived storms, all while creating  warmer-than-normal sea surface temperatures in the Caribbean Sea and tropical Atlantic Ocean. 

These warm waters are pure hurricane fuel, and those temperatures have been incredibly high this spring. But the temperatures in the North Atlantic basin, where the storms are born and intensify, and the eastern-central tropical Pacific Ocean, where El Niño forms, are the places to watch.

“This year, the two are in conflict—and likely to exert counteracting influences on the crucial conditions that can make or break an Atlantic hurricane season,” Iowa State University atmospheric scientist Christina Patricola writes in The Conversation. “The result could be good news for the Caribbean and Atlantic coasts: a near-average hurricane season. But forecasters are warning that that hurricane forecast hinges on El Niño panning out.”

[Related: El Niño is probably back—here’s what that means.]

Ocean temperatures in the Atlantic’s tropical regions were unusually warm during the most recent active hurricane seasons. In 2020, the Atlantic produced a record 30 named storms and the 2005 season produced 15 hurricanes including Hurricane Katrina.

The tropical Pacific Ocean influences the Atlantic hurricanes by forming teleconnections—a chain of processes that change the ocean or atmosphere in one region which then leads to larger scale changes that can influence the weather in other places.

“During El Niño events, the warm upper-ocean temperatures change the vertical and east-west atmospheric circulation in the tropics,” Patricola writes. “That initiates a teleconnection by affecting the east-west winds in the upper atmosphere throughout the tropics, ultimately resulting in stronger vertical wind shear in the Atlantic basin. That wind shear can tamp down hurricanes.”

Atlantic hurricane season ends on November 30. In the meantime, NOAA encourages those who could be affected by tropical systems to understand watches and warnings for their area and prepare emergency supplies ahead of time. 

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When you look up at the clouds, what do you see? A blob, a wisp, perhaps an elephant-shaped clump. It’s fun to get creative with the descriptions, but scientists have a formal classification system that can be useful to the everyday cloud watcher, too. We’ve made a field guide to types of clouds, so next time you’re enjoying a day outside, you can put your newfound knowledge of the skies to work.

What’s in clouds and their names?

Clouds are made up of droplets of water or tiny ice crystals floating in the planet’s atmosphere. They hold clues about the weather—like if it’s going to rain, snow, or worse—and the interesting physical and chemical cycles churning through the air.

“They are such an amazing feature of Earth that are simply fun to look at and study,” says Vanessa Maciel, an atmospheric scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. Clouds are shaped by the many changing characteristics of the atmosphere: temperature, moisture, winds, and more. 

[Related: Make your own weather station with recycled materials]

Just like animal species, climate scientists have a system for naming clouds with genera, plus smaller subdivisions of species and varieties. These designations are based on their shape, appearance, and how high they are in the atmosphere. Each genus of clouds can be described as one of four main shapes, first categorized in 1803: cirro-form, cumulo-form, strato-form, and nimbo-form. Cirro-type clouds are the thin wisps; cumulo-type clouds are huge and fluffy; strato-type clouds are wide and flat layers; and nimbo-type clouds are the quintessential gray rain clouds. 

The astonishing diversity of clouds might seem overwhelming to a beginning cloud-gazer, but Maciel has advice on where to start. “A great way to narrow down the type of cloud you are seeing is to first try to estimate whether it is in the lower, middle, or high atmosphere,” she says.

High clouds

The highest clouds are the wispiest: cirrus, cirrocumulus, and cirrostratus. They generally form above 20,000 feet, and typically indicate a coming change in the winds or weather. In certain regions of the tropics, they can even indicate that hurricanes are on the way. Generally, the air gets colder higher up in Earth’s atmosphere, so cirrus and friends are made up of ice crystals that are stretched and spread by the winds, giving them their thin, strand-like shapes.

Cirrus are the thinnest wisps, whereas cirrocumulus appear more like a thin, rippled white sheet. Cirrostratus are a more homogenous sheer veil. If you see a bright halo forming around the sun, that might be the cirrostratus. When cirrus clouds stack together like ridges, almost like a rack of ribs, the variety is called vertebratus.

Maciel’s favorite cloud looks a bit like a cirrus cloud, but is actually something quite different. Nacreous clouds, also known as mother-of-pearl or ice polar stratospheric clouds, are made of very cold ice. When the sun goes down they catch the light and reflect brilliant colors. “These colors occur only during sunrise and sunset, and are created by the interaction between sunlight and the cloud’s ice crystals, which are smaller than that of a standard ice cloud,” says Maciel. “They are also pretty rare as they only occur at high atmospheric altitudes and high latitudes.” Your best bet of seeing them is near the planet’s poles.

Mid-level clouds

In the middle of the atmosphere, we start to see more clumps: altostratus and altocumulus. They can be found 6,500 to 20,000 feet up, and tell very different tales when it comes to weather—altocumulus often mean you’ve got a pleasant day ahead, but altostratus indicate a long bout of rain or snow. 

Altostratus appear as large, flat sheets that aren’t quite thick enough to block out the sun entirely. Altocumulus, on the other hand, look like a horde of little cotton balls scattered in the sky. You’ve likely seen a few different species and varieties of altostratus and altocumulus before, particularly cavum. This variety is a continuous sheet of cloud with a big chunk missing. Stratiformis is another common species of altocumulus, where high clouds appear like a patchy, ridged sheet. Similarly, if there are layers of cloud that cover the sun entirely, they may be a variety known as opacus.

Low clouds

Many kinds of clouds start close to the ground—6,500 feet or below—and extend high into the atmosphere. These clouds are called nimbostratus, stratus, stratocumulus, cumulus, and cumulonimbus. These clouds are made up of water droplets from the surrounding warm air, creating their quintessential fluffy look.

Nimbostratus are the gray gloomy clouds that indicate rain. Stratus clouds also create gloomy days as they cover the sky in a low sheet of dingy white. Stratocumulus are somewhat similar to altocumulus, but they have a darker shadow and don’t appear quite as bright white as their higher altitude counterparts. 

Cumulus and cumulonimbus clouds are the behemoths of the bunch. Cumulus are huge white clouds reaching high up into the sky—the classic cotton balls. Cumulonimbus, on the other hand, are imposing and a bit foreboding, with a high, flat top and a promise of rain storms.

[Related on PopSci+: Cloudy with a chance of cooling the planet]

Low clouds come with some of the oddest and most interesting varieties and features. This is where tubes or vortexes appear from clouds, called tuba. They can also show—for a brief moment, anyway—a feature that looks like a set of perfect crashing waves, known as fluctus. Although the fluctus pattern looks almost too good to be true, it’s a somewhat common consequence of the physics of fluid motions. Stratocumulus clouds can also put on a cow costume: That is, they can grow little nubs on their undersides that almost look like udders, known as mamma. Cumulus clouds can even put on a hat, an accessory cloud called pileus that pops up at the top of one of these huge cloud formations.

What clouds to look for now

This summer, you can expect all the fair weather clouds, plus some of the weirder ones that pop up with summer storms like pileus. “Summer usually has clear skies, unlike the overcasts typical of winter,” adds Maciel. “But as summer also has a lot of convection due to the warm surface temperature, you can expect to see cumulus clouds, which are your iconic fluffy and bright white clouds.”

Clouds are just as complex as their classifications, and they’re changing not just with the seasons, but also with the climate. As Earth’s temperature warms, the varieties we see might change, too. “In spite of their ubiquity, there is still a lot about clouds that we don’t know,” says Maciel. For now, though, see how many you can spot—and enjoy the beautiful views provided by our planet’s magnificent atmosphere.

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One in five people could live in dangerously hot conditions by the end of the century if global warming continues at its current pace, even if nations uphold their pledges under the Paris Agreement, scientists warned in a new peer-reviewed study. It’s the latest research published in recent days that points to the stark human and societal costs of the accelerating climate crisis as global carbon emissions continue to rise to unprecedented levels.

The study, published Monday in the journal Nature Sustainability, estimates that some 2 billion people would see a mean annual temperature of 84 degrees Fahrenheit or higher, starting in as early as 2070, when Earth’s population is expected to reach at least 9.5 billion. Most people live in a “human climate niche” that ranges between a mean annual temperature of 55 degrees and 80 degrees, the researchers said, so that many people experiencing a major uptick in regional heat would be unprecedented.

Such a temperature threshold, where 84 degrees or higher becomes the middle ground for the year, can also be very dangerous for anyone without air conditioning or other means to cool off, the study’s authors also noted. According to their estimate, some of the nations that will be hardest hit by the heat are also home to some of the world’s poorest communities, where air conditioning typically isn’t an option.

Of the estimated 2 billion people that could be forced out of their climate niche and into dangerous extreme heat, the study found, 600 million will be in India, 300 million in Nigeria and 100 million in Indonesia.

“Those people who are affected are the poorer people on the planet,” Tim Lenton, director of the Global Systems Institute at Exeter and the study’s lead author, told Forbes. “At higher temperatures, life becomes unbearable, affecting water, agriculture and food. You can’t barricade yourself from climate change. There is an undeniable interconnection amongst nations.”

Among the study’s most pertinent findings is the drastic difference it would make for the world to limit average warming to just 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels—the most ambitious target of the Paris Agreement. Scientists estimate that under the global climate treaty’s current pledges, the world is still on track to warm by roughly 2.7 degrees Celsius by 2100. But if emissions were significantly slashed to limit average warming to 1.5 degrees, Monday’s study said, just 400 million people would be pushed outside their climate niche instead of 2 billion.

Monday’s study also comes on the heels of a major report released last week by the United Nations’ weather agency, which warned that heat will likely soar to record levels in many parts of the world over the next five years. Global warming, combined with a climate pattern known as El Niño, will largely drive that heat, the report’s authors said, with the next five years almost certainly set to be the warmest five-year period ever recorded.

“This will have far-reaching repercussions for health, food security, water management and the environment,” Petteri Taalas, the World Meteorological Organization’s secretary general, told the New York Times. “We need to be prepared.”

It’s not just extreme heat that climate scientists have warned about in recent days.

On Monday, the World Meteorological Organization released another report, which found that the economic damage of natural disasters continues to rise, even as improvements in early warning systems have helped reduce the loss of life. In that report, the U.N. body tallied nearly 12,000 extreme weather, climate and water-related events globally between 1970 and 2021 that have killed more than 2 million people and caused $4.3 trillion worth of economic damage.

And climate change is already affecting all parts of the world, not just the poorer regions. About $1.7 trillion of that financial damage took place in the United States alone.

The new studies and reports, in many ways, are pointing to a reality with which many people are already familiar. This week, swathes of India are baking under extreme heat, with some places reaching temperatures as high as 113 degrees Fahrenheit on Monday. Over the weekend, raging wildfires in Canada continued to send smoke south into the U.S., prompting officials in Colorado and Montana to issue air quality alerts. And last week, heavy rainfall inundated 43 towns in Italy, causing landslides and flash floods that killed 14 people and destroyed hundreds of roads.

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In 2020, about 34 million households in the United States experienced some degree of energy insecurity. Energy insecurity is defined as the inability to meet basic household energy needs, like reducing or foregoing basic necessities to pay energy bills. Others may maintain unsafe temperatures at home due to cost concerns, both of which are “chronic” forms of energy insecurity. Individuals may also experience “acute” energy insecurity, or a short-term disruption to energy sources due to infrastructural or environmental reasons, much like power outages.

People who need electronic medical devices and live in poor housing conditions tend to experience higher rates of energy insecurity. A recent Nature Communications study characterized power outages across the country from 2018 to 2020 and found that there were almost 17,500 power outages lasting more than eight hours. Outages of this duration are considered medically relevant because of potential health hazards for vulnerable groups, especially those who require electricity-dependent durable medical equipment (DME) such as oxygen concentrators and infusion pumps. Although some DME can have backup battery power, they only last a few hours.

“Understanding to what extent power outages affect health motivated us to create the county-level power outages dataset,” says Joan Casey, assistant professor of environmental and occupational health sciences at the University of Washington, who was involved in the study. “As our grid ages and climate change worsens, we need to understand who power outages affect.”

[Related: Fossil fuels are causing a buildup of human health problems.]

The authors used local indicators of spatial association (LISA) to identify countries with high levels of social and medical vulnerability alongside frequent power outages. In particular, counties in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Michigan experience frequent medically-relevant power outages and have a high prevalence of electricity-dependent DME use. They “face a high burden and may have more trouble responding effectively, which could result in more adverse health outcomes,” says Casey.

The authors also determined the overlap between climate events occurring on the same day as medically-relevant power outages. They reported that about 62 percent of such outages co-occurred with extreme weather events, like heavy precipitation, anomalous heat, and tropical cyclones. Furthermore, medically-relevant outages are 3.4 times more common on days with a single event and 10 times more common on days with multiple events. Weather and climate events may drive large-scale outages, but increased energy demand from an aging electrical grid may play a role in county-level outages.

Upgrading the grid and relying further on distributed generation like generating and storing renewable energy are necessary to prevent power outages and ensure that huge areas won’t go offline, says Casey. The Department of Energy intends to modernize the grid to increase resiliency, add capacity for clean energy, and optimize power delivery. The department is also investing in energy infrastructure like microgrids, which can disconnect from national infrastructure and continue to run even when the main grid is down, and grid-scale energy storage devices, which store clean electricity to help provide power during peak loads.

“Certain communities and individuals may experience more and more severe power outages or have less ability to respond,” says Casey. “These groups may be persistently marginalized and lack access to generators, charging centers, or health care.”

Communities of color have unequal access to energy generation and battery storage, even though they tend to be the hardest hit when it comes to power outages following extreme climate events. After Hurricane Maria in 2017, rural and Black communities in Puerto Rico appeared to have the longest restoration times. Higher percentages of Hispanic/Latino populations were also associated with longer outages in Florida after Hurricane Irma in 2017. Meanwhile, counties with a higher proportion of Hispanic/Latino residents faced more severe power outages during the 2021 Texas winter storm. Black residents reported more day-long outages as well.

“We need to work to understand who is most at risk during an outage and provide support to these populations,” says Casey. “This could involve preparing health systems to receive patients, community charging stations for those that rely on electricity-dependent medical equipment, or weatherproofing homes to keep indoor temperature at more optimal levels.”

[Related: Heart disease-related deaths rise in extreme heat and extreme cold.]

Developing a registry for individuals medically dependent on electricity would establish a national estimate for this vulnerable population and document their geographic location. This can help state, territorial, and local health departments prioritize efforts and anticipate the resources that first responders should deploy during emergencies. At present, the Department of Health and Human Services only keeps the record of over 2.9 million Medicare beneficiaries who need electricity-dependent DME. The number of DME users covered by other insurance programs is not known. 

Jurisdictions with a high prevalence of prolonged outages could also help vulnerable populations by establishing temporary emergency power stations. Such a solution could make electricity more accessible and reduce avoidable emergency department visits, which may prevent crowding. Together, upgrading the grid, mitigating climate change, and providing alternative electricity sources can all minimize the impacts on power supply faced by vulnerable populations and communities of color.

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Typhoon Mawar pelted Guam with heavy rain and the strength of a Category 4 hurricane over about two days. The storm was upgraded to a ‘Super Typhoon’ when it reached maximum sustained winds of 150 miles per hour as it moved north of the island. President Joe Biden approved an emergency declaration for the  US territory of about 150,000 people on Tuesday May 23.

[Related: What hurricane categories mean, and why we use them.]

According to the National Weather Service Guam, the storm had Category 4-level winds of about 140 miles per hour just before midnight local time on Wednesday May 24 as it passed over Guam. Guam International Airport recorded sustained winds of 71 mph and a gust of 105 mph. The storm’s eye passed just north of the island, but the powerful eyewall hit the whole island.

Initial estimates say that close to a foot of rain fell and approached two feet in some parts of the territory. Guam is about the size of the city of Chicago and sits about 1,500 miles east of the Philippines.

Typhoons are the same type of warm-core tropical storm as hurricanes, except that they form west of the Northwest Pacific Ocean. Mawar was one of the strongest typhoons to hit Guam in decades. In 2002, Super Typhoon Pongsona struck the island with the force of a Category 4 hurricane and caused over $700 million in damage. 

In an address on Facebook, Guam Governor Lou Leon Guerrero urged residents to stay home for their safety, as the island was still seeing 40 to 50 mph winds on Thursday morning. The governor reported that the strongest winds from the storm were felt throughout the island, but particularly in the north.

The Guam Power Authority reported that the island’s energy grid was providing power to only about 1,000 of its roughly 52,000 customers. As of Thursday morning, the government had not reported any deaths due to the storm. 

According to The New York Times, strong building codes minimized damages and deaths from major storms in Guam. In most cases, “we just barbecue, chill, adapt” when a tropical cyclone blows through, says Wayne Chargualaf, who works at the local government’s housing authorities. However, since it has been over 20 years since Super Typhoon Pongsona, he told The Times that “we have an entire generation that has never experienced this. So a little bit of doubt started to creep into my mind. Are we really ready for this?”

[Related: Typhoon Merbok breaks records as it lashes the Alaskan coast.]

Human-caused climate change is contributing to an increasing number of intense tropical storm systems like Mawar. Tropical systems are generating more rainfall and bigger storm surges and are also more likely to intensify faster. Mawar rapidly intensified from Monday into Tuesday, with the storm’s top wind speeds increasing by 50 mph in only 18 hours.

Mawar will continue to track west-northwest away from Guam and towards the northern Philippines and Taiwan. It strengthened to the equivalent of a Category 5 hurricane with winds of 165 mph and gusts up to 200 mph, but slow weakening is likely and it is not expected to threaten land in the next several days.  

The Atlantic Hurricane Season begins on June 1 and runs until November 30. The National Hurricane Center is already watching a system off the coast of Florida. An early forecast from Colorado State University released in April calls for slightly below-average hurricane activity, partially due to the current neutral conditions before El Niño likely begins in the Pacific Ocean.

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This article was originally featured on Nexus Media and Ambrook Research..

On a clear morning in April, after milking his seven cows, Tim Sauder looked over the pasture where he had just turned the animals out to graze. Like many dairy farms, Sauder’s fields swayed with a variety of greenery: chicory, alfalfa and clover. But they were also full of something typically missing on an agricultural landscape — trees. Thousands of them.

Between 2019 and 2021, Sauder planted 3,500 trees at Fiddle Creek Dairy, a 55-acre family farm in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where he and his wife raise cows to produce yogurt, cheese and beef. Today, young willow, hickory, poplar, pecan and persimmon trees stud the pastures, and on a crisp spring morning, rows of honey and black locusts, bur and cow oaks, were beginning to leaf out, casting shadows on the long grass below.

Sauder said planting trees has always been a priority; before he filled his pastures with them, the farm was home to a small fruit orchard as well as riparian buffers — trees planted along the creek to prevent erosion and safeguard water quality. But the trees that his cattle now graze beneath represent a fundamental shift in his operation.

The Sauders are betting the farm, as it were, on silvopasture, the ancient practice of raising animals and growing trees and pasture on the same piece of land (silva is forest in Latin). In a silvopasture setup, farmers carefully manage each element to benefit the other—relying on manure to fertilize trees, for example, or fallen fruit to feed the livestock—resulting in a system that’s greater than the sum of its parts. 

It’s an old idea that’s gaining modern traction. Last year, the USDA awarded the Nature Conservancy and multiple partner organizations a $64 million grant to advance agroforestry — the umbrella term for agricultural practices that incorporate trees — by providing technical and financial assistance to farmers looking to make the switch. This year’s Farm Bill could mean another infusion of funding as well as the expansion of existing agroforestry programs to more explicitly include silvopasture. 

“The USDA is doing a lot, but a lot more could be done,” said Jabob Grace, communications project manager with the Savanna Institute, a nonprofit that promotes agroforestry practices. His organization is advocating that the 2023 Farm Bill increase appropriations for the National Agroforestry Center, the only government agency dedicated to the practice, from $5 million to $25 million (Grace said the Center has been chronically underfunded, never receiving more than $2 million annually). They’re also pushing for the establishment of regional agroforestry centers, the development of a USDA technical assistance program in agroforestry, and more grant money dedicated to helping farmers like Sauder establish a silvopasture system. 

In Sauder’s pastures, “each tree has multiple benefits,” he explained. Mulberry leaves have more protein than alfalfa, and the seed pods that fall off the honey locust every autumn are packed with sugar; those trees were chosen to supplement the animals’ diet. Sauder chose other tree species with leafy canopies to protect his herd’s health. “Come August, there will be shade here when the cows need it.”

Providing shade may seem like a matter of comfort, but it can actually be one of life and death. Last summer, thousands of cattle died in Kansas, after the area was racked by historic heat and humidity. As the climate heats up, researchers think mortality events like the one in Kansas will become more common. But even when cattle survive brutally hot summers, the impact of heat stress can wreak havoc on a farm’s bottom line.

Grace said the farmers he works with are worried about what hotter temperatures mean for their livelihoods. 

“When we talk to our producers about silvopasture, the first thing they’re interested in is shade,” Grace said. “They’re noticing the hotter temperatures. Their cattle are uncomfortable, they’re not putting on weight. Cash is almost directly flowing out of that farmer’s pocket when they have overheated cattle.”

A lot of cash, in fact. A 2022 study from Cornell University predicted that losses of cattle herds due to heat stress will total $15 to $40 billion a year by the end of the century. To avoid these losses, the authors note that “tree–livestock systems can be highly effective in reducing heat stress.” And Farm Bill funding could help more farmers get started.

Shade is one way silvopasture cuts down on costs, but there are others. Some poultry farmers use the method to shield their flocks from birds of prey. Vineyards and Christmas tree farms are increasingly turning to grazing animals to mow and control weeds.

But a silvopasture system can do more than simply save farmers money; it can help them diversify what they grow. Perhaps one of the oldest — and most profitable — examples of silvopasture is the dehesa system of southern Spain, where Ibérico pigs wander among towering oak trees, feasting on acorns and fertilizing the soil, resulting in some of the world’s most expensive ham and a cash crop of cork.

While livestock health and revenue are compelling reasons for farmers to practice silvopasture, perhaps the method’s most convincing advantage is its potential as a climate solution. 

Project Drawdown, a nonprofit that analyzes climate solutions, ranks silvopasture as the 11th most effective strategy for combating climate change — well ahead of solar panels, recycling and electric cars — finding that pastures with trees sequester five to 10 times as much carbon as similarly sized but treeless pastures.

The perennial roots of a silvopasture system can also help stabilize the soil, preventing erosion as well as the flooding that’s becoming more common with heavier rains. Additionally, a well-managed silvopasture operation can reduce wildfire loads — thanks to carefully spaced and pruned trees as well as grazing animals that control the shrubby understory — and increase biodiversity.

What’s more, when livestock get to eat the forage that’s right in front of them, the gas-guzzling farming equipment and trucks typically used to get food to feedlots can stay in park. “Cutting back on harvesting and transporting means a significant reduction in greenhouse gasses,” Grace explained.

According to Grace, large swaths of the American Midwest used to be covered by a natural silvopasture of sorts, an oak savanna ecosystem where grazing animals like bison dined on prairie beneath fruit and nut trees. Many Indigenous cultures embraced and benefited from this form of land management, until European settlers got to work deforesting the region, eventually building farms that worked more like factories. 

This emphasis on efficiency led to widespread monoculture and annual cropping systems where, Grace said, “for a good chunk of the year, not much is happening.” 

Today, only about 1.5% of farmers in the U.S. (approximately 31,000) practice any form of agroforestry, including silvopasture, a 2017 USDA survey revealed. But as summers get hotter and climate predictions more dire, interest in the practice is booming. Matthew Smith, research program lead at the USDA’s National Agroforestry Center, said “the demand for silvopasture knowledge and information is higher than anyone can provide.” 

That’s because silvopasture is more complicated than turning livestock loose in the woods; it requires choosing the right trees and forage for the local climate and constantly moving livestock from one place to another. 

“If folks are interested in silvopasture, they really should have expertise in rotational grazing beforehand…which is hard to learn,” Smith said. “Things can go wrong quickly when all your crops are in the same place.” Livestock left in one spot too long can damage trees, for example, and plants grown too close together can outcompete each other for light and nutrients. 

There are other challenges. For one thing, silvopasture systems require a large area of land and more hours of labor — at least at first — to maintain. Additionally, it takes trees many years to grow and begin to provide meaningful benefits. But, by far, the greatest obstacle for most farmers who want to practice silvopasture is the high price of purchasing, planting and maintaining trees. 

The vast majority of silvopasture operations rely on grants and cost-sharing programs from organizations like the Natural Resources Conservation Service and the USDA, programs  that advocates like Grace say badly need the boost in funding and staff that this year’s Farm Bill could provide. Grace said that the handful of existing agroforestry programs, such as the Conservation Reserve Program and the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, are vague in their wording and need to be tweaked to more explicitly fund silvopasture projects and provide additional cost-sharing opportunities to farmers. 

Savanna Institute ally and climate NGO Carbon 180 is recommending that the 2023 Farm Bill increase federal cost share to 75% for agroforestry practices to help defray upfront costs and ensure farmers can access high-quality, regionally appropriate trees and shrubs. 

In the meantime, funding remains a “major barrier to farmers hoping to pursue silvopasture,” said Austin Unruh, owner of Trees for Graziers, who helped Tim Sauder secure money from the Pennsylvania office of the NRCS. Unruh, whose business has helped about 25 farms implement silvopasture in the last three years, said helping farmers pay for them “has been frustrating. It’s a different source of funding each time, different hoops to jump through.”

For Sauder, the financial assistance from the state was paramount. He said that without it, the trees in his pasture simply wouldn’t be there, “at least not for the next 20 years or so.” 

He admits that the new system has been a lot of work upfront, but that he expects it to pay off in the form of healthier pasture, soil and cows — and hopefully his land’s ability to support more of them. 

And yet, it’s working in tandem with nature that inspires Sauder the most. Running his farm with the health of the ecosystem top of mind, he said, is like making up for the mistakes of his ancestors, Mennonite immigrants who displaced Indigenous people and bent the land to their will. 

“I’m reimagining what would have happened if they had arrived here and said instead, ‘What’s the best way to live in this place?’”

This article is copublished with Ambrook Research as part of a series that looks at ways the 2023 Farm Bill can help address the climate crisis. Nexus Media News is an editorially independent, nonprofit news service covering climate change. Follow us @NexusMediaNews.

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This year is going to be pretty unforgettable, and not in a good way. Climate scientists have predicted the arrival of El Niño, a climate pattern that temporarily warms up waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean and will change precipitation and temperature patterns around the world.. The last El Niño event took place from 2018 to 2019.

Each El Niño is unique in terms of how intense the warming effect gets, says Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA. This makes it harder for individual areas along the Pacific, like California and countries in Southeast Asia, to know how to properly prepare for upcoming storms or flooding. 

Past El Niño events can help areas get a broad sense of how strong the next one will be, but as time goes on, Swain says it is likely we will see an increase in extreme El Niño events because of climate change. This upcoming one is expected to make 2023 the hottest year in human history.

What is the forecast for El Niño 2023?

Climate scientists use a variety of tools to predict when and how hard El Niño will hit. Some examples include satellites to track wind and tropical rainfall patterns, ocean buoys to monitor sea surface temperatures, and mini radios strapped to weather balloons that measure air temperature, humidity, and pressure. 

David DeWitt, director of the Climate Prediction Center at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, forecasts an 82 percent chance of El Niño arriving between May and July. A weak El Niño is not out of the question, but the likelihood of a strong El Niño is about 55 percent. There’s also a 90 percent chance of El Niño persisting in the first few months of 2024.

How does El Niño warm the ocean?

During El Niño, weak winds coming from the east cause heat to build up along the equator in the eastern Pacific Ocean. As the waters warm up, they transfer heat to the atmosphere and create moisture-rich air that fuels rainstorms and floods.

One sign of an upcoming El Niño event to look out for is Kelvin waves in the Pacific. These aren’t your normal beach waves: They resemble the slow sloshing ones in your bathtub. The long movements pull expanding warm water to the ocean’s surface, which in turn, raises sea levels. They also strengthen El Niño by further reducing how much cold water is on the ocean’s surface. 

[Related: The jet stream is moving north. Here’s what that means for you.]

Recently, satellites orbiting Earth detected two- to four-inch-high Kelvin waves moving west to east along the equator. They also measured higher than average sea levels—another strong clue for El Niño. “If it’s a big one, the globe will see record warming,” NASA scientist Josh Willis said in a statement.

How will El Niño affect global weather patterns?

Brad Rippey, a meteorologist for the US Department of Agriculture, says El Niño is expected to cause flooding in some regions and droughts in others. During the Northern Hemisphere summer (June to August), El Niño will likely suppress Atlantic hurricanes and bring drought in regions such as Central America, the Caribbean Basin, and southern and southeastern Asia. During the Southern Hemisphere summer (December to February), areas like southern Africa, Australia, and the western Pacific Basin will experience more heat, droughts, and fires. 

Some regions of the world, however, will face wetter conditions. Rippey says that parts of South America, such as Argentina, have been reeling from drought because of the long-running La Niña that began in 2020. With El Niño, these areas would finally get doused with precipitation.

Is climate change making El Niño worse?

El Niño and its cooler counterpart La Niña are part of a natural cycle between warming and cooling of the Pacific Ocean that was first detected by South American fisherman in the 17th century. That said, climate change is interacting with this cycle and shaping a future with stronger El Niño episodes. “The Earth’s natural climate cycle and climate caused by humans are not independent of each other,” Swain explains. He adds that before global warming, the world’s temperature would reset after El Niño, but now it remains elevated.

The combination of human-caused global warming and short-term warming from El Niño could mean that the second half of 2023 or early 2024 will break global temperature records, Swain says.

Is the world prepared for the switch from La Niña to El Niño?

Yes and no. While most communities have experienced the upturns and downturns of El Niño before, each cycle is different. This upcoming one is no exception.

The level of preparation depends on the country and whether El Niño will trigger more heatwaves or flooding. Another factor is a country’s economy and whether they can afford to invest in protective measures.

[Related: This summer could push US energy grids to their limits]

“It’s usually the places that are most vulnerable that often have the least ability to shift things around to prepare,” says Swain. The 2015-2016 El Niño event, for example, caused heat stress, malnutrition, and disease outbreaks for more than 60 million people living in developing countries. But that doesn’t mean richer countries come out unscathed. For instance, El Niño events in the past 15 years cost the US economy $25 billion. A study published on May 18 in the journal Science estimates the average El Niño cost the global economy $3.4 trillion.

Being a few months away, Swain says it’s unlikely that a resource-poor region can change things around in a short time. “Now the question becomes, how much resilience do these places have to these kinds of natural hazards?”

The post El Niño is probably back—here’s what that means appeared first on Popular Science.

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A worrying new report from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) estimates over two-thirds of North America will see elevated risks of energy grid shortfalls and blackouts over the summer if faced with extreme temperature spikes and dire weather. While resources remain “adequate” for normal seasonal peak demand, the major non-profit international regulatory authority’s 2023 Summer Reliability Assessment warns most of the US—including the West, Midwest, Texas, Southeast, and New England regions—may not possess enough energy reserves to handle heatwaves, severe storms, and hurricanes.

NERC’s report is particularly troubling given this year’s El Niño forecast. El Niño historically produces wetter-than-average conditions along the Gulf Coast alongside drier climates for areas such as the Pacific Northwest and the Rocky Mountains. While a naturally occurring event, both El Niño and La Niña weather patterns are expected to rapidly strengthen by the end of the decade due to the exacerbations from climate change. On top of this, industry watchdogs say the US power grid still requires critical maintenance, repairs, and modernization. “The system is close to its edge,” warned NERC’s Director of Reliability Assessment and Performance Analysis John Moura in a call with reporters.

In Texas, for example, the NERC explains that “dispatchable generation may not be sufficient to meet reserves during an extreme heat wave that is accompanied by low winds.” Wildfire risks in the West and Northwest, on the other hand, could jeopardize the ability to transfer electricity as needed, resulting in “localized load shedding.”

[Related: How an innovative battery system in the Bronx will help charge up NYC’s grid.]

“This report is an especially dire warning that America’s ability to keep the lights on has been jeopardized. That’s unacceptable,” Jim Matheson, the CEO of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, said in a statement.“Federal policies must recognize the compromised reliability reality facing the nation before it’s too late.”

In addition to reliability concerns during peak performance times, the NERC report notes that continued supply chain issues concerning labor, material, and equipment have affected preseason maintenance for generation and transmission facilities across North America.

Still, NERC’s assessment isn’t entirely bad news—much of northern Canada and the US East Coast face a low risk of exceeding their operating reserves. Meanwhile, no region in North America is currently staring down a “high” risk of not meeting their needs during normal peak conditions. “Increased, rapid deployment of wind, solar and batteries have made a positive impact,” said Mark Olson, NERC’s manager of Reliability Assessments. “However, generator retirements continue to increase the risks associated with extreme summer temperatures, which factors into potential supply shortages in the western two-thirds of North America if summer temperatures spike.”

The post This summer could push US energy grids to their limits appeared first on Popular Science.

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WHEN A NUCLEAR-POWERED satellite crashes to Earth, whom do the authorities call? What about when a derailed train spills toxic chemicals? Or when a wildfire burns within the fenceline of a nuclear-weapons laboratory? When an earthquake damages a nuclear power plant, or when it melts down? 

Though its name isn’t catchy, the National Atmospheric Release Advisory Center (NARAC) is on speed dial for these situations. If hazardous material—whether of the nuclear, radiological, biological, chemical, or natural variety—gets spewed into the atmosphere, NARAC’s job is to trace its potentially deadly dispersion. The center’s scientists use modeling, simulation, and real-world data to pinpoint where those hazards are in space and time, where the harmful elements will soon travel, and what can be done.

The landscape of emergency response

NARAC is part of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which is run by the National Nuclear Security Administration, which itself is part of the Department of Energy—the organization in charge of, among other things, developing and maintaining nuclear weapons. 

Plus, NARAC is part of a group called NEST, or the Nuclear Emergency Support Team. That team’s goal is to both prevent and respond to nuclear and radiological emergencies—whether they occur by accident or on purpose. Should a dirty bomb be ticking in Tempe, they’re the ones who would search for it. Should they not find it in time, they would also help deal with the fallout. In addition, NEST takes preventative measures, like flying radiation-detecting helicopters over the Super Bowl to make sure no one has poisonous plans. “That’s a very compelling national mission,” says Lee Glascoe, the program leader for LLNL’s contribution to NEST, which includes NARAC. “And NARAC is a part of that.”

And if a suspicious substance does get released into the atmosphere, NARAC’s job is to provide information that NEST personnel can use in the field and authorities can use to manage catastrophe. Within 15 minutes of a notification about toxic materials in the air, NARAC can produce a 3D simulation of the general situation: what particles are expected where, where the airflow will waft them, and what the human and environmental consequences could be. 

In 30 to 60 minutes, they can push ground-level data gathered by NEST personnel (who are out in the field while the NARAC scientists are running simulations) into their supercomputers and integrate it into their models. That will give more precise and accurate information about where plumes of material are in the air, where the ground will be contaminated, where affected populations are, how many people might die or be hurt, where evacuation should occur, and how far blast damage extends. 

Modeling the atmosphere

These capabilities drifted into Lawrence Livermore decades ago. “Livermore has a long history of atmospheric modeling, from the development of the first climate model,” says John Nasstrom, NARAC’s chief scientist.

That model was built by physicist Cecil “Chuck” Leith. Leith, back in the early Cold War, got permission from lab director Edward Teller (who co-founded the lab and was a proponent of the hydrogen bomb) to use early supercomputers to develop and run the first global atmospheric circulation model. Glascoe calls this effort “the predecessor for weather modeling and climate modeling.” The continuation of Leith’s work split into two groups at Livermore: one focused on climate and one focused on public health—the common denominator between the two being how the atmosphere works. 

In the 1970s, the Department of Energy came to the group focused on public health and asked, says Nasstrom, whether the models could show in near real time where hazardous material would travel once released. Livermore researchers took that project on in 1973, working on a prototype that during a real event could tell emergency managers at DOE sites (home to radioactive material) and nuclear power plants who would get how much of a dose and where.

The group was plugging along on that project when the real world whirled against its door. In 1979, a reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania partially melted down. “They jumped into it,” Nasstrom says of his predecessors. The prototype system wasn’t yet fully set up, but the team immediately started to build in 3D information about the terrain around Three Mile Island to get specific predictions about the radionuclides’ whereabouts and effects.

After that near catastrophe, the group began preemptively building that terrain data in for other DOE and nuclear sites before moving on to the whole rest of the US and incorporating real-time meteorological data. “Millions of weather observations today are streaming into our center right now,” says Nasstrom, “as well as global and regional forecast model output from NOAA [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration], the National Weather Service, and other agencies.” 

NARAC also evolved with the 1986 Chernobyl accident. “People anticipated that safety systems would be in place and catastrophic releases wouldn’t necessarily happen,” says Nasstrom. “Then Chernobyl went wrong, and we quickly developed a much larger-scale modeling system that could transport material around the globe.” Previously, they had focused on the consequences at a more regional level, but Chernobyl lofted its toxins around the globe, necessitating an understanding of that planetary profusion.

“It’s been in a continuous state of evolution,” says Nasstrom, of NARAC’s modeling and simulation capabilities. 

‘All the world’s terrain mapped out’

Today, NARAC uses high-resolution weather models from NOAA as well as forecast models it helped develop. Every day, the center brings in more than a terabyte of weather forecast model data. And those 3D topography maps they previously had to scramble to make are all taken care of. “We already have all the world’s terrain mapped out,” says Glascoe. 

NARAC also keeps up-to-date population information, including how the distribution of people in a city differs between day and night, and data on the buildings in cities, whose architecture changes airflow. That’s on top of land-use information, since whether an area is made up of plains or forest changes the analysis. All of that together helps scientists figure out what a given hazardous release will mean to actual people in actual locations around actual buildings.

Helping bring all those inputs together, NARAC scientists have also created ready-to-go models specific to different kinds of emergencies, such as nuclear power plant failures, dirty bomb detonations, plumes of biological badness, and actual nuclear weapons explosions. “So that as soon as something happens, we can say, ‘Oh, it’s something like this,’ that we got something to start with.” 

Katie Lundquist, a scientist specializing in scientific computing and computational fluid dynamics, is NARAC’s modeling team lead. Her team helps develop the models that underlie NARAC’s analysis, and right now it is working to improve understanding of how debris would be distributed in the mushroom cloud after a nuclear detonation and how radioactive material would mix with the debris. She’s also working on general weather modeling and making sure the software is all up to snuff for next-generation exascale supercomputers. 

“The atmosphere is really complex,” Lundquist says. “It covers a lot of scales, from a global scale down to just tiny little eddies that might be between buildings in an area. And so it takes a lot of computing power.”

NARAC has also striven to improve its communications game. “The authorities make the decision, but in a crisis, you can’t just give them all the information you’ve generated technically,” Glascoe says. “You can’t give them all sorts of pretty images of a plume.” They want one or two pages telling them only what the potential impact is. “And what sort of guidelines might help their decision making of whether people should shelter, evacuate, that sort of thing,” says Glascoe. 

To that end, NARAC has made publicly available examples of its briefing products, outlining what an emergency manager could expect to see in its one to two pages about dirty bombs, nuclear detonations, nuclear power plant accidents, hazardous chemicals, and biological agents.

The sim of all fears

Recently, the team has been assisting with radioactive worries in Ukraine, where Russia has interfered with the running of nuclear power plants. It also previously kept an analytical eye on the 2020 fires in Chernobyl’s exclusion zone and the same year’s launch of the Mars Perseverance rover. The rover had a plutonium power source, and NARAC was on hand to simulate what would happen in the event of an explosive accident. Going farther back, the team mobilized for weeks on end during the partial meltdown of the Fukushima reactors in Japan in 2011. 

But one of the events Glascoe is most proud of happened in late 2017, when sensors in Europe started picking up rogue radioactive activity. Across the continent, instruments designed to detect elemental decay saw spikes indicating ruthenium-106, with more than 300 total detections. “We were activated to try and figure out, ‘Well, what’s going on? Where did this come from?’” says Glascoe. 

As NARAC started its analysis, Glascoe remembered an internal research project involving the use of measurement data, atmospheric transport models, statistical methods, and machine learning that he thought might be helpful in tracing the radioactivity backward, rather than making the more standard forward prediction. “As the data comes in, the modeling gets adjusted to try and identify where likely sources are,” says Glascoe. 

Like the prototype that DOE had called up for use with Three Mile Island, this one wasn’t quite ready, but Glascoe called headquarters for permission anyway. “I said, ‘Hey, I know we haven’t really kicked the tires too much on this thing, except they did conclude this project and it looks like it works.’” They agreed to let him try it. 

Four days and many supercomputer cycles later, the team produced a map of probable release regions. The bull’s-eye was on a region with an industrial center. “And sure enough, a release from that location would do the trick,” says Glascoe. 

The suspect spot was in Russia, and many now believe the radioactivity came from the Mayak nuclear facility, which processes spent nuclear fuel. Mayak is located in a “closed city,” one that tightly controls who goes in and out. 

Ultimately, no one can stop the atmosphere’s churn, or its tendency to push particles around. The winds don’t care about borders or permits. And NARAC is there to scrutinize, even if it can’t stop, that movement.

Read more PopSci+ stories.

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Best Overall		Ambient Weather WS-2902C WiFi Smart Weather Station		SEE IT	A solar-powered, connected measurement system that’s quick to setup and easy to monitor.
Best For The Money		Tempest Weather System		SEE IT	With a downward-facing intake and 1,000-plus feet of wireless data transmission, this solar-powered, Google Home-equipped station meets all needs.
Best Basic		EZRead Headwind Consumer Products 840-0052 5-in-1 Weather Station		SEE IT	Easy to install and clean, this inexpensive and highly educational station measures more than you’d expect.

With summers getting hotter and hotter each year, wanting a personalized weather statement each day is starting to make more sense. However, if you’re new to the home weather station game, you might not be sure of what you want yet. There are quite a lot of options to choose from, wired and wireless models to deal with, and even some viable analog products out there. When paired with samey-looking digital displays, it can be difficult to decide the overall best product. That’s why we’ve worked diligently to determine customers’ needs in a home weather station, while also avoiding common flaws these systems might have. The result is our list of the best home weather stations purchasable in 2023.

• Best overall: Ambient Weather WS-2902C WiFi Smart Weather Station
• Best for the money: Tempest Weather System
• Best with wind speed: WeatherFlow WEATHERmeter
• Best basic: EZRead Headwind Consumer Products 840-0052 5-in-1 Weather Station
• Best budget: Newentor Weather Station

How we selected the best home weather stations

I have experience with consumer weather station usage in a field environment, as per my previous career in the sciences. Used for much the same reason that anyone would want a personal home weather station—the desire to know very local meteorological conditions—I have a bit of insight into what you might desire from a home weather station. Not to mention what problems you might face! For, as it turns out when you have instruments measuring weather, you also have to open them up to the weather, a not always friendly beast. I combined that experience with critical reviews and online user impressions to select our top five models for home weather stations.

The best home weather stations: Reviews & Recommendations

The home weather stations we’ve collected vary in style, functionality, and pricing so that you’ll be able to find something that fits your desires. We’ve also looked at what you’re looking for, such as compatibility with the Google Home system, and found top-ranking products that match those desires.

Best overall: Ambient Weather WS-2902C WiFi Smart Weather Station

Ambient Weather

SEE IT

Why it made the cut: The Ambient Weather WS-2902C is Amazon’s best-rated home weather station and has robust weather monitoring capabilities.

Specs

• Measures: Wind speed and direction, temperature, humidity, rainfall, UV and solar radiation
• Power supply: Solar with AA-battery backup
• Sensor size: 15 x 11 x 10 inches

Pros

• Solar-powered measurement station
• Connects with Ambient Weather system
• Quick setup

Cons

• Measurement station and display device use different types of batteries

The first home weather station, and the overall winner on our list, is the Ambient Weather WS-2902C. The WS-2902C earns this distinction by having appealing features and being the best-rated home weather station by online shoppers.

First and foremost is the easy setup-and-forget nature of this home weather station. After taking a few minutes to place it on a pole, you won’t find yourself fiddling with it often. Part of this is because of its hybrid solar and battery-powered measurement unit. Another important aspect is how easily accessible your data is via the Ambient Weather app environment.

One of the main problems I found with the product was that the display device and measurement stations used different types of batteries—the former taking AAA’s and the latter taking AA’s (may we recommend rechargeables). Admittedly, this is a minor problem, as the display device can be plugged in and the measurement station only needs batteries for cloudy days.

At the end of the day, this is a fantastic wireless weather station that also has nice power-saving features, making it amongst the best eco-friendly home weather stations as well. All for a sub-$200 price point!

Best for the money: Tempest Weather System

WeatherFlow

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Why it made the cut: The Tempest Weather System provides information on par with a professional weather system but at a much more affordable price.

Specs

• Things measured: Temperature, “feels like” temperature, solar and UV radiation, wind speed and direction, dew point, humidity, barometric pressure, lightning strikes, rainfall
• Power supply: Solar with lithium-ion battery backup
• Sensor size: 11.70 x 4.23 inches

Pros

• Downward-facing intakes on measurement device
• Solar-powered
• Works well with Google Home
• 1,000+ foot wireless data transmission range

Cons

• Periodic measurement quirks

The Tempest Weather System provides a myriad of data points in a well-designed package. With the Tempest reporting around a dozen weather stats, it is hard to believe that it has no moving parts, reducing the impacts of age and wear and tear on the system. Furthermore, the design makes sure that any openings are downwards-facing, reducing the chances of clogging.

Unlike a lot of home weather systems, the Tempest Weather System does not have an indoor display unit. Instead, the Tempest Weather Station is “smart” and updates every 3 seconds to 1 minute to a wireless transmission hub you can locate within 1,000 feet of the weather station. From there, info is sent to your smartphone(s) and Internet-of-Things devices. This includes Google Assistant, making it the best weather station for Google Home. You can then use the data to program your smart home, such as by having fans turn on or off depending on temperature readings given by the device.

All of this advanced measurement isn’t 100% perfect, but once you understand the quirks, you’ll be able to get a good read. The rain gauge, for example, uses touch-based vibrational sensors to get a reading. Each pitter-patter of rain on the side gets interpreted as a raindrop. That’s great, but sometimes other vibrations or small things hitting in on the windiest of days will also set it into rain gauge mode. The lightning detection has its own quirks, with user reviews mentioning that the Tempest Weather Station has mistaken gunshots for lightning. However, once these small quirks are acknowledged and accounted for, you are left with the best home weather station for the money due to just how much it can do.

Best with wind speed: WeatherFlow WEATHERmeter

WeatherFlow

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Why it made the cut: The WeatherFlow WEATHERmeter is your personal handheld view into the world of wind.

Specs

• Things measured: Average wind speed, wind gust, apparent wind speed, true wind speed, wind direction, temperature, humidity, pressure, dew point, heat index, wind chill, etc.
• Power supply: Internal battery
• Size: Handheld

Pros

• High mobility
• Works directly with your phone
• Gives detailed wind speed analysis
• Multiple app integrations

Cons

• Uses phone’s compass instead of providing one

If you’re here just to know about wind speed, you’ll be delighted with the handheld WeatherFlow WEATHERmeter. This version is the newest update to the popular 2019 model and has the capability to give you a detailed look at your immediate wind conditions, making it a perfect golf, kiting, or overall nature companion.

One interesting thing that the WeatherFlow WEATHERmeter will tell you is both the apparent wind speed and true wind speed. The apparent wind speed tells you how fast the wind is going relative to the device, while the true wind speed gives a measure of how fast the wind is actually going. The WeatherFlow WEATHERmeter also reports gust wind speeds and average wind speeds.

The makers of the WeatherFlow WEATHERmeter clearly have the hobbyist in mind and that shows more in the selection of apps you can use it with than with any other factor. Pair this weather station with any of the following six apps: Wind & Weather Meter, iKiteSurf, iWindSurf, SailFlow, FishWeather, and WindAlert.

What might disappoint you about the WeatherFlow WEATHERmeter is the lack of an internal compass. Instead, you must rely on your phone’s compass for accurate wind direction readouts. However, we wouldn’t count this as too bad of a tradeoff considering phone compasses are getting better every year and you are able to get such an advanced wind meter in such a convenient-to-carry form.

Best basic: EZRead Headwind Consumer Products 840-0052 5-in-1 Weather Station

EZRead

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Why it made the cut: This analog weather station gives you a hands-on read of your local weather conditions.

Specs

• Things measured: Temperature, wind chill, rainfall, total rain, wind speed and direction
• Power supply: N/A; completely analog
• Item size: 1 x 8 x 10 inches

Pros

• Highly educational
• Easy to install and clean
• Measures more than expected
• Inexpensive

Cons

• Tiny measurement display can’t be read from window

For the weather hobbyist that wants to understand the weather in a way that transcends digital charts and displays, the EZRead 840-0052 is the best home weather station. Considering that it is only ~$20, the EZRead can also be bought in bulk, making it also ranked as the best weather station for kids and student projects.

To get started using the EZRead the only thing you’ll need to do is mount it and wait for weather to happen. The mounting process is relatively simple, as the metal frame has two preconfigured holes in it, which Headwind Consumer Products recommends affixing to a fence or patio support, but feel free to be creative.

The EZRead measures a surprising quantity of things, including total rain and wind speed, and does so in both the good ole American Imperial units as well as the more scientifically customary metric units. The EZRead has a wind chill chart directly on the device, to help you convert the thermometer’s temperature to a “feels like” number. In this way, this home weather station will become an arithmetic booster for your kids and bridge the gap between science, math, and reality.

Finally, for all that has been said about cleaning tubes and open holes in home weather stations, it must be said that nothing can be easier to clean than the rain gauge on the EZRead. It is essentially a removable graduated cylinder and can be cleaned with a vase or pipe cleaner quickly. The manufacturer recommends this rain gauge part be turned upside down during freezing weather to prevent damage, but it can just as easily be moved inside.

Best budget: Newentor Weather Station

Newentor

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Why it made the cut: This home weather station provides you with the reading and stats you really want without the extra costs and hassles of a premium model.

Specs

• Things measured: Temperature and humidity
• Power supply: AA-batteries
• Display size: 7.5 inches

Pros

• Also includes atomic clock, weather forecast, and lunar phase
• Display unit can accommodate up to 3 sensors
• Gets the fundamentals right without charging you extra

Cons

• Limited valid sensor placements

If the main thing you want to know is how hot of a summer day you are about to face and how much humidity will be bearing down on you, consider looking no further than the Newentor Weather Station. You aren’t being charged extra for delicate wind meters and rain gauges, and the whole apparatus is supplemented by local weather forecasts. This is definitely the best home weather station for those in rural areas where the local station’s rain forecast is good enough but local humidity and temperature change wildly based on local hills, mountains, rivers, and lakes.

This home weather station’s indoor display unit will also give you additional information, such as the time from the WWVB atomic clock system, a weather forecast, the current moon phase, and a mini calendar. A happy/sad/neutral face system will tell you about the outside weather conditions and there are optional temperature alerts. The Newentor should sync with the WWVB system within about 24 hours of initial use, after which all time-based additional features will begin working.

The sensors (this package comes with one, but you can order up to two more for the system) can be installed within 200 feet of your indoor display unit, but some care must be taken in this. Newentor recommends a North-facing wall and that the unit be out of the way of rain and direct sunlight. In my eyes, this makes a North-facing patio the best place for installation, but your personal circumstances may vary. Additionally, the unit requires two AA batteries.

Finally, while our best basic product (the EZRead, discussed above) is technically the cheapest home weather station on our list, we’ve listed this as our best budget pick. The reasoning is simple: The Newentor Weather Station is the best digital weather station under $50.

Things to consider before buying home weather stations

When you first decided to buy a home weather station, you probably excitedly asked yourself a few questions, such as: Can a home weather station measure more than temperature and humidity? Can I get one that is affordable? Where will I be able to put the measuring devices?

As it turns out, there are quite a few things that you will need to consider when making a home weather station purchase that aren’t that obvious, including:

Things measured

The big four for home weather stations are temperature, humidity, wind speed, and wind direction. Nearly all home weather stations can measure these but there are things that you might want to be measured, such as the UV radiation level, that are nice to know and can add extra usefulness to your system. Some of our best home weather station picks can also measure other stats, such as dew point, lightning strikes, and gust wind speed.

One issue is that you may discover you don’t really want or need all of the measurements provided by a given home weather station. While being able to measure a lot of different things looks great for marketing, it also drives up costs. For many people, a home weather station that is able to measure a few things well is better than a home weather station that can measure dozens of things.

Additionally, as we’ll see in the next category, you should also consider the ability of each thing to be measured properly based on your local environment. Based on the instrument positioning, see below, measuring rainfall might be difficult if you’re wanting to set up your home weather station near a small-leafed bush.

Instrument positioning

Instrument positioning will likely be the most important, but also most obscure, factor that determines your overall happiness with your home weather station. One of the unfortunate parts of being a weather machine is that you have to experience a lot of, well, weather and nature. You’ll want to think about where you are going to put your home weather station’s measurement device as well as where any intake holes are placed on it.

Commonly, difficulties with instrument positioning will present themselves in an upward-facing hole, usually as part of the rain gauge. One aesthetically pleasing, but operationally sub-optimal installation onto a pole that has a bird feeder or bird house and you’ve got a major problem: bits of seeds or bird excrement clogging up your home weather station.

Other sources of problems include foliage blocking wind meters, mowed lawns kicking up grass into side-facing holes, and overheating equipment. Not all devices are made to withstand all conditions. You want one that’s durable and then you want it positioned thoughtfully so you can, say, find out how much action your home wind turbine might get today or whether you need to be worried for your solar generator’s panels.

Power supply

Are you going with a battery or a wire for your home weather station? The answer to this question is going to be very important for the quality of interactions you have with your home weather station.

While you might think that the choice will come down to having a wired model or something with a battery, the reality is a bit different. Some models tend to work off of solar power, with a battery used as a backup, while other models use solely batteries. We’ll be presenting a mixture of both styles to you, as each can be appealing at certain price ranges and functionalities.

We also have a very basic analog product, the EZRead Headwind Consumer Products 840-0052 5-in-1 Weather Station. This one forgoes the whole power supply problem altogether and relies solely on the power of wind and gravity to make it work.

FAQs

Final thoughts on the best home weather stations

Getting one of the best home weather stations in 2023 means that you can get quality without having to spend the sometimes exorbitant amounts for professional weather stations that meteorologists use. Even basic analog weather stations like the EZRead can provide value to the right person, but we recommend the Ambient Weather WS-2902C WiFi Smart Weather Station for the right blend of quality and cost.

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The West just had a very wet winter. The snowpack at the top of the Rocky Mountains, which feed the Colorado River, a crucial water source for seven states and Mexico, has been replenished. The Great Salt Lake has risen a little more than three feet. Currently, the US Drought Monitor shows that almost all of California is out of a severe drought.

Now, spring temperatures are causing the snowpack on the Sierra Nevadas to melt and trickle down to California’s waterways. After enforcing steep cuts in some counties in 2021 and 2022, the state just granted more river water to millions of residents and agriculture. For farms in particular, this means they may not have to rely as heavily on groundwater, which is being rapidly depleted in some parts of the state.

[Related: This phantom lake in California is back with a vengeance]

But scientists warn this one strange winter should be taken as that: extraordinary. To fully rid the West of its long-term megadrought, which research shows has been exacerbated by climate change, there would need to be several rainy and snowy winters in a row, says Wei Zhang, a climate scientist and assistant professor at Utah State University.

Zhang calculated how abnormal California’s precipitation was from December 2022 to February 2023 using data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and found it was about 52 percent higher than average. “It’s an extreme event—it happens every few decades,” he notes.

“This wet winter definitely is great news for the Colorado River because of the snowpack. That snow runoff from the mountains will drain into the Colorado River and increase the stream flow,” Zhang explains. “But that cannot solve the water problem in the Colorado River—that demand is still much larger than the supply.”

The Colorado River has been overused for decades. And thanks to the megadrought, which has caused increased evaporation and decreased snowfall, it’s also shrinking. The federal government plans to adopt a final decision this summer about how to best manage the parched river—and which states will lose acre-feet of water from the plan. 

Zhang is also digging into why this past winter was so wet in Western states. He says it’s unlikely it was caused by climate change, which would cause precipitation to fall more as rain than snow. He thinks it’s more likely tied to shifts in jet streams, or the upper level wind flows that drive the movement of winter storms. These new patterns could potentially be tied to changes in climate, but either way, scientists need more evidence before they can make a definitive conclusion about the reason behind all the snow this winter.

“This extreme event could be caused by some random [atmospheric] processes in the climate system, or it could also be forced by some sea surface temperature anomalies, or because of the background changes in the [Earth’s] climate,” Zhang says. “But it’s very difficult to build that causal relationship between one extreme winter or one extreme event and climate change.”

[Related: Farmers accidentally created a flood-resistant ‘machine’ across Bangladesh]

Simon Wang, another climate scientist and professor at Utah State University, thinks that while climate change can contribute to the overall warming of the planet and increases in precipitation, it doesn’t regulate year-to-year patterns. 

Like Zhang, he’s cautious about how much impact one season can have. “Drought is a long-term problem that requires sustained water management and conservation efforts, as well as proactive measures to adapt to increasing aridification due to increased evaporation,” he writes in an email to PopSci. “While this wet winter has helped to alleviate some immediate concerns, it is not a solution to the diminishing water supply.”

Both Wang and Zhang emphasize that California and the rest of the West’s water woes have not yet waned. “Many people may think that we don’t have a water problem anymore. I don’t think that’s true,” Zhang says. “All the models are projecting a dryer and hotter western US [in the next decades]. I don’t think this event will overturn that trend.”

Correction (May 2, 2023): The article previous incorrectly stated that the Sierra Nevada snowpack feeds the Colorado River. It should be the Rocky Mountains.

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

They found the victims floating in the water. Some had eyeballs full of air bubbles, others had their stomachs pushed up into their mouths. Many had severe internal bleeding.

Volcanoes can be life-threatening for fish. A major eruption in 2011 in Chile, for instance, killed 4.5 million of them. Researchers have studied how lava flows, hot gases, and deadly debris can cause mass die-offs or even cut fish off from the sea in suddenly landlocked lakes. But few have been able to document in detail the grisly fates experienced by the unlucky fish that find themselves at the mercy of an angry volcano. That’s why when one erupted underwater off the coast of El Hierro in the Canary Islands for 150 days in late 2011 and early 2012, researchers including Ayoze Castro Alonso at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria saw the perfect opportunity to study the intricacies of these piscine casualties.

Ten years later, the devastating eruption of a terrestrial volcano on nearby La Palma, another of the Canary Islands, gave Alonso and his colleagues a chance to see an altogether different way that volcanoes can butcher unsuspecting fish—by overwhelming them with debris.

The scientists detail in a new paper the shocking injuries suffered by 49 fishes killed by the El Hierro eruption and 14 fishes killed by the volcanism near La Palma. “It’s a volcanic eruption in both cases, but the pathological syndromes are completely different,” says Alonso. “One is acute, the other is chronic.”

The underwater eruption near El Hierro superheated the water by as much as 19 °C, reduced the oxygen level, and rapidly acidified the ocean. Alonso and his colleagues found fishes with gas bubbles in their bodies. The team concluded the injuries occurred while the fishes were still alive because the scientists found inflammatory cells indicative of physical trauma and a severe build-up of blood in the fishes’ tissues.

The researchers’ detailed necropsies also hint that the fishes made a fateful dash for safety. Once the El Hierro eruption was underway, Alonso says, the fishes ascended rapidly. “They tried to escape,” he says.

As the fishes swam upward, sudden depressurization likely caused the gases dissolved in their bodies to bubble out, accounting for the bubbles in their eyes and under their skin. Depressurization would also explain why the animals’ stomachs were pushed up into their mouths and why some had overinflated swim bladders. These gas-filled organs expand when fish rise toward the surface.

On La Palma, though, molten lava flowed over land and into the ocean where the sudden clash with cold water quenched it into a glassy rock known as hyaloclastite. Within a week, huge clouds of volcanic ash settled into the water. Fish died after their gills became clogged with ash, or after their digestive tracts were impacted with fragments of glassy hyaloclastite.

Some of the findings are familiar to Todd Crowl, an ecosystem scientist at Florida International University who was not involved in the current study but who witnessed an eruption on Dominica in the Caribbean during the 1990s. A few centimeters of ash fell on the island, Crowl says, contaminating streams and killing thousands of filter-feeding shrimp. “All that ash just completely clogged up [the shrimp’s] filters,” he says.

Alonso and his colleagues’ research is the first to analyze the wounds fish suffer during a volcanic eruption in such detail—in part because getting access to the victims while their bodies are still fresh is incredibly difficult. After the eruptions at El Hierro and La Palma, local officials gathered up stricken fishes and shipped them on ice to the researchers within a matter of days.

Crowl says this rapid collection let the scientists conduct their analyses before the fishes rotted away. “We get fish kills all the time in Florida because of algal blooms and stuff like that,” Crowl says. “But by the time we get the specimens, there’s lots of degradation.”

Volcano ecologist Charlie Crisafulli, formerly of the US Forest Service, who was not involved in the work, agrees that the study of such fresh victims is novel: “We haven’t seen this before.” However, Crisafulli isn’t certain that the fishes killed by the El Hierro eruption actively tried to flee. Alternatively, they might have been stunned by the rapid changes in their environment and simply floated upward in a state of shock.

Though all of this seems deeply unpleasant, Crisafulli stresses there is a bigger picture here worth thinking about. Volcanoes kill, but they also create. Eruptions contribute nutrients to the environment, and lava flows build new land—sometimes entire islands.

“With this so-called destruction and loss of life, also there’s the creation of new habitats,” Crisafulli says. “What was initially a loss ends up becoming a gain through time.”

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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To mitigate the death and disaster brought by tsunamis, people on the coasts need the most time possible to evacuate. Hundred-foot waves traveling as fast as a car are forces of nature that cannot be stopped—the only approach is to get out of the way. To tackle this problem, researchers at Cardiff University in Wales have developed new software that can analyze real-time data from hydrophones, ocean buoys, and seismographs in seconds. The researchers hope that their system can be integrated into existing technology, saying that with it, monitoring centers could issue warnings faster and with more accuracy. 

Their research was published in Physics of Fluids on April 25. 

“Tsunamis can be highly destructive events causing huge loss of life and devastating coastal areas, resulting in significant social and economic impacts as whole infrastructures are wiped out,” said co-author Usama Kadri, a researcher and lecturer at Cardiff University, in a statement.

Tsunamis are a rare but constant threat, highlighting the need for a reliable warning system. The most infamous tsunami occurred on December 26, 2004, after a 9.1-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Indonesia. The tsunami inundated the coasts of more than a dozen countries over the seven hours it lasted, including India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Maldives, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Seychelles, Thailand and Somalia. This was the deadliest and most devastating tsunami in recorded history, killing at least 225,000 people across the countries in its wake. 

Current warning systems utilize seismic waves generated by undersea earthquakes. Data from seismographs and buoys are then transmitted to control centers that can issue a tsunami warning, setting off sirens and other local warnings. Earthquakes of 7.5 magnitude or above can generate a tsunami, though not all undersea earthquakes do, causing an occasional false alarm. 

[Related: Tonga’s historic volcanic eruption could help predict when tsunamis strike land]

These existing tsunami monitors also verify an oncoming wave with ocean buoys that outline the coasts of continents. Tsunamis travel at an average speed of 500 miles per hour, the speed of a jet plane, in the open ocean. When approaching a coastline, they slow down to the speed of a car, from 30 to 50 miles per hour. After the buoys are triggered, they issue tsunami warnings, leaving little time for evacuation. By the time waves reach buoys, people have a few hours, at the most, to evacuate.

The new system uses two algorithms in tandem to assess tsunamis. An AI model assesses the earthquake’s magnitude and type, while an analytical model assesses the resulting tsunami’s size and direction.

Once Kadri and his colleagues’ software receives the necessary data, it can predict the tsunami’s source, size, and coasts of impact in about 17 seconds. 

The AI software can also differentiate between types of earthquakes and their likelihood of causing tsunamis, a common problem faced by current systems. Vertical earthquakes that raise or lower the ocean floor are much more likely to cause tsunamis, whereas those with a horizontal tectonic slip do not—though they can produce similar seismic activity, leading to false alarms. 

“So, knowing the slip type at the early stages of the assessment can reduce false alarms and complement and enhance the reliability of the warning systems through independent cross-validation,” said co-author Bernabe Gomez Perez, a researcher who currently works at the University of California, Los Angeles in a press release.

Over 80 percent of tsunamis are caused by earthquakes, but they can also be caused by landslides (often from earthquakes), volcanic eruptions, extreme weather, and much more rarely, meteorite impacts.

This new system can also predict tsunamis not generated by earthquakes by monitoring vertical motion of the water.

The researchers behind this work trained the program with historical data from over 200 earthquakes, using seismic waves to assess the quake’s epicenter and acoustic-gravity waves to determine the size and scale of tsunamis. Acoustic-gravity waves are sound waves that move through the ocean at much faster speeds than the ocean waves themselves, offering a faster method of prediction. 

Kadri says that the software is also user-friendly. Accessibility is a priority for Kadri and his colleague, Ali Abdolali at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), as they continue to develop their software, which they have been jointly working on for the past decade.

By combining predictive software with current monitoring systems, the hope is that agencies could issue reliable alerts faster than ever before.

Kadri says that the system is far from perfect, but it is ready for integration and real-world testing. One warning center in Europe has already agreed to host the software in a trial period, and researchers are in communication with UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission.

“We want to integrate all the efforts together for something which can allow global protection,” he says. 

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Following a very wet winter featuring plenty of other wild weather, regions of the US are bracing for flood risk, as record breaking snow begins to melt and puts millions at risk.

Here’s what you need to know about the most risky locations. 

Flood Risk Closes Yosemite National Park

Most of the valley at the heart of Yosemite National Park in California will close to visitors beginning at 10 PM on Friday April 28 lasting through at least May 3. The rare shutdown could last longer as swiftly melting snow runs into the Merced River and through Yosemite Valley.  

[Related: There are rivers in the sky—and one is causing raging rain over California.]

The extremely popular park, home to towering granite formations like El Capitan and Half Dome as well as numerous waterfalls, saw 3.6 million tourists in 2022.

Central California is bracing for its warmest temperatures of the year as well as a looming heat wave with high temperatures in the 90s Fahrenheit and overnight lows above freezing. According to the National Weather Service, temperatures will be about five to 15 degrees above average, and the heat is expected to speed up the spring thaw after record winter snowfall in the Sierra Nevada mountain range. 

A series of atmospheric rivers brought numerous snowstorms to the region this winter, with some parts of Yosemite seeing up to 15 feet of snow. The park was closed for about three weeks in February due to the snowfall, which was one of Yosemite’s longest and most expansive weather-related closures. 

California State Climatologist Michael Anderson noted that significant flooding was more likely to occur later in May, not in late April. Reservoir operators in the region are releasing water now to make room for more water as the spring thaw continues.

A large basin in the northern San Joaquin Valley along the Tulare River is a major area of flooding concern. A long-dried lake bed was refilled with water from storm runoff and submerged large swaths of farmland and ranches. 

Mississippi River towns brace for flooding

Over 1.4 million people were under flood warnings on Tuesday April 25, with warnings stretching along the Mississippi River from North Dakota to parts of Missouri.

Twenty river gages along the Mississippi River are at major flood stage, partially as the snow begins to melt. Multiple cities in the Upper Midwest saw record snowfall this season, which could lead to some of the worst flooding in two decades. 

[Related: Last year’s historic floods ruined 20 million acres of farmland.]

The Mississippi River at La Crosse, Wisconsin, is forecast to crest near 16.1 feet Wednesday April 26 into Thursday April 27. This would be the area’s third highest crest, measuring  close to the record of 17.89 feet set in April 1965. According to the NWS, “water is within one foot of Rose Street near Interstate 90, and the eastbound I-90 exit may be closed,” if it reaches 16 feet. 

Davenport, Iowa began installing barriers to keep flood waters out, as the city of about 100,000 people braces for warm weather and snowmelt. The city is no stranger to these spring floods, but is preparing for the worst. In 2019, Davenport and other parts of the Midwest saw record flooding, when gages saw a 22.7 feet flood crest.  

The snow will continue to melt across the US as spring temperatures heat up. To stay safe in floods, it is critical to understand flood risks and zones and always have an evacuation plan in case of changing forecasts and water levels. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has multiple flood maps that can help you assess your risk for flood and plan accordingly. 

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This article was originally featured in Nexus Media News.

After a series of winter storms pummeled California this winter, thousands of trees across the state lost their grip on the earth and crashed down into power lines, homes, and highways. Sacramento alone lost more than 1,000 trees in less than a week. Stressed by years of drought, pests and extreme weather, urban trees are in trouble.  

The U.S. Forest Service estimates that cities are losing some 36 million trees every year, wiped out by development, disease and, increasingly, climate stressors, like drought. In a recent study published in Nature, researchers found that more than half of urban trees in 164 cities around the world were already experiencing temperature and precipitation conditions that were beyond their limits for survival.  

“So many of the trees that we’ve relied upon heavily are falling out of favor now as the climate changes,” said Nathan Slack, the urban forest superintendent for the city of Santa Barbara. Conifers, like pines and coastal redwoods, once extensively planted along the coast, are dying in droves, he said. “The intensity of heat [and] the longer periods [without] rainfall really force us, as urban forestry managers, to reimagine what are good street trees.” 

Trees help keep neighborhoods cool, absorb rain water and clean up air pollution. But in order for them to provide those critical functions they need to survive those same conditions. For many cities, that means reconsidering what species are planted. 

Slack said he is looking to trees that typically grow further east, like the paloverde, that do better in warmer, drier conditions. “The trees that survive in the desert are going to be much more useful to us here,” he said. 

In Sacramento, species like the “Bubba” desert willow are replacing redwoods, said Jessica Sanders, the executive director of the Sacramento Tree Foundation. “It’s sad because it’s an iconic tree,” Sanders said, “but it’s not really suited to the Sacramento region’s climate at this point.”

It’s not just California cities that are rethinking their canopies. 

In Harrisonburg, Virginia, officials are bringing in willow oak and sweetgum — trees that are more tolerant to heat than many local species — from the coast. In Seattle, they’re planting more Pacific madrone and Garry oaks, which stand a better chance of surviving hotter, drier summers.

In Detroit, which was once known as the “City of Trees,” for its extensive canopy, officials are planting hardy trees like the Eastern redbud, American witch hazel and White oak that can withstand extreme heat and flooding.

City officials are also expanding species diversity to fend off disease, aiming not to allow any single species to comprise more than 10% of the city’s canopy. Detroit lost much of its canopy between the 1950s and 1990s to Dutch elm disease and an invasive beetle called the emerald ash borer. Today almost 40% of the trees that remain are considered “poor quality,” said Jenni Shockling, the senior manager of urban forestry in Detroit for American Forests, a nonprofit. “[They] consist of species that are prone to disease and storm damage, cause property and infrastructure damage, and drop heavy amounts of debris.”

Preserving urban tree cover can mean the difference between life and death on a heating planet. Extreme heat kills roughly 12,000 people annually already in the United States; experts say that figure could reach 100,000 by century’s end. A study published by the Lancet in January found that increasing a 30% increase to a city’s tree cover could cut heat-related deaths by a third.

Poorer neighborhoods with large non-white populations tend to have less tree cover and can get up to 20 degrees warmer than wealthier (and greener) neighborhoods, according to several studies.  “A map of trees in any city in America is a map of income and a map of race,” said Jad Daley, the president and CEO of the nonprofit American Forests.

Cites may soon see some relief. The Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law last year, includes $1.5 billion for the Forest Service’s Urban and Community Forestry Program, amounting to a five-fold increase in the program’s annual budget. 

The funding has the potential to transform urban canopies, according to experts like Daley. But as Slack and other arborists across the country turn to new species to fill their streets, they’re running into a new issue: supply. 

“Right now there are bottlenecks in the traditional nursery supply line,” said Shockling. “Growers tend to favor specific species because they grow well in the nursery or grow quickly, but that doesn’t necessarily speak to the species diversity standards that we’re trying to adhere to.”

American Forests has partnered with the U.S. Forest Service to invest in and develop nurseries across the country to improve the supply chain. “The nurseries need some assurances that what they’re growing is going to have market value, and we have the assurance that what we’re going to purchase will have a supply,” Shockling said.

Those large-scale investments will be crucial to updating the make-up of urban canopies, according to David Teuschler, the chief horticulturist at Devil Mountain, one of California’s largest nurseries. 

According to Teuschler, even California native trees, like the Coastal Live oak, are struggling in the state’s droughts. He’d like to invest more in trees like Mesa oak or Silver oak to sell in Northern California and Swamp mallet or Salt Marsh gum to sell in Southern California, but it can take years to grow trees to a saleable size, and then he has only a limited time to sell those seedlings. Unsold trees are usually composted, burned, or otherwise destroyed. 

He needs to know he’ll have customers who have a clear eye toward the future. 

“You have to remember that there are a lot of old-school people out there that want to plant redwoods,” he said. “You want to be the nursery that has these drought-adapted species, but if you can’t sell them, it’s waste.” 

One of Devil Mountain’s longtime customers is California arborist Dave Muffly, who stocks all his projects with drought-tolerant species. 

Muffly first began looking for drought-resistant trees 15 years ago, while leading a project to plant 1,000 trees along a two-mile stretch of highway that runs through East Palo Alto. He wanted evergreens, to block freeway pollution from reaching the low-income community on the other side, and drought-tolerant varieties, but most of the state’s nurseries held few options.

Muffly began scouring the Southwest for acorns from hardier species of oaks; with more than 500 species of oak around the world that can breed and create viable hybrids, the trees are particularly likely to evolve traits that can help them survive rapid climate change, Muffly said. 

With Teuschler’s help, his projects – including a 9,000-tree mega-project around Apple’s campus – have served as a proof of concept for cities as they work toward climate-resilient tree canopies.

Through channeling federal funding toward nurseries like Devil Mountain, this kind of holistic system could be replicated around the country to meet each region’s unique needs, Muffly said. 

“The truth is we don’t grow anywhere near enough trees in the United States to spend the money that the government just put out,” Muffly said. “So now it’s time to build an arsenal of ecology, and the production lines are the new nurseries that will have to be built to grow the trees.”

This article is co-published with Next City. Nexus Media News is an editorially independent, nonprofit news service covering climate change. Follow us @NexusMediaNews.

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NOTE: This story has been updated to reflect an additional death from the tornadoes.

The 2023 tornado season continues to rage as several tornadoes touched down near the Oklahoma City metropolitan area on Wednesday night, killing at least three people, according to local authorities. Two of the fatalities were reportedly near Cole, Oklahoma, a town of about 600 people roughly 20 miles south of Oklahoma City. The number of injuries due to the storms is still being assessed.

[Related: Tornado outbreak killed dozens of people across the US this weekend.]

The severe weather included winds up to 70 miles per hour and ping-pong ball size hail. At least 13 tornadoes were reported in Oklahoma, Iowa, and Kansas during the evening hours on Wednesday. Of those reported storms, two tornadoes in Iowa and one in Kansas have already been confirmed. Oklahoma appears to be the hardest hit state with at least four confirmed tornadoes and 20,000 homes without power.

A large tornado was confirmed in Shawnee, a town of 30,000 about 60 miles east of Cole. The National Weather Service in Norman, Oklahoma said that that particular storm was moving “erratically” towards north Shawnee around 10 PM local time on Wednesday. Oklahoma Baptist University in Shawnee reported “significant” damage to its campus, but said no injuries had been reported. The university canceled classes for Thursday and Friday and said it was relocating students.

The Red Cross Oklahoma is opening up shelters in the central portion of the state for those affected by the storms. 

On Thursday, the threat of severe storms is expected to shift east, with storms possible in eastern Texas, northwestern Louisiana, southeastern Oklahoma, southeastern Missouri, and a large swath of Arkansas.

Tornadoes can occur all over the world, but the United States sees more than any other country at an average of about 1,150 to 1,200 per year. The geography and climate in the US provides the key ingredients for rotating storms: cold and dry air mixing with warm and humid air. 

This year has already been a deadly year for tornadoes. In March, a series of severe storms and a powerful EF-4 tornado in Mississippi’s Lower Delta killed at least 25 people and devastated the town of Rolling Fork, Mississippi. EF-4 tornadoes have top wind gusts of 166 to 200 miles per hour and represent only about two percent of all tornadoes.

[Related: Strong storms and strange weather patterns sweep the US.]

Earlier this month, at least 100 tornadoes were reported in a severe weather outbreak that struck Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Delaware, Maryland, and New Jersey. At least 32 people were killed and towns were completely leveled.

The severe weather could only increase with climate change, but scientists are still not ready to declare that a warming planet means more tornadoes. A study published in January forecasts that by 2100, the average annual number of supercells—the large rotating storms that typically produce the most  severe tornadoes—that hit the eastern part of the United States will increase by 6.6 percent.

To prepare for a tornado, the NWS recommends keeping an emergency kit stocked, following local weather reports, and practicing a tornado plan. During a storm, get to the lowest point in your home or building and stay away from windows until the storm passes.

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This article is republished from The Conversation.

Trees can die suddenly or quite slowly.

Fire, flood or wind can cause a quick death by severely damaging a tree’s ability to transport water and nutrients up and down its trunk.

Sometimes a serious insect attack or disease can kill a tree. This kind of death usually takes from a few months to a couple of years. Again, a tree loses its ability to move water and nutrients, but does so in stages, more slowly.

A tree can also die of what you might call old age.

I am a scientist who studies trees and the web of living things that surround them. The death of a tree is not exactly what it seems, because it directly leads to new life.

Different trees, different life spans

Trees can live an incredibly long time, depending on what kind they are. Some bristlecone pines, for instance, are among the oldest known trees and are more than 4,000 years old. Others, like lodgepoles or poplars, will have much shorter life spans, from 20 to 200 years. The biggest trees in your neighborhood or town are probably somewhere in that range.

You’ve probably noticed that different living things have different life spans – a hamster is generally not going to live as long as a cat, which isn’t going to live as long as a person. Trees are no different. Their life spans are determined by their DNA, which you can think of as the operating system embedded in their genes. Trees that are programmed to grow very quickly will be less strong – and shorter lived – than ones that grow very slowly.

But even a tough old tree will eventually die. The years and years of damage done by insects and microscopic critters, combined with abuse from the weather, will slowly end its life. The death process may start with a single branch but will eventually spread to the entire tree. It may take a while for an observer to realize a tree has finally died.

You might think of death as a passive process. But, in the case of trees, it’s surprisingly active.

The underground network

Roots do more than anchor a tree to the ground. They are the place where microscopic fungi attach and act like a second root system for a tree.

Fungi form long, superfine threads called hyphae. Fungal hyphae can reach much farther than a tree’s roots can. They gather nutrients from the soil that a tree needs. In exchange, the tree repays fungi with sugars it makes out of sunlight in a process known as photosynthesis.

You might have heard that fungi can also pass nutrients from one tree to another. This is a topic that scientists are still working out. Some trees are likely connected to other trees by a complex underground network of fungi, sometimes called the “wood wide web.”

How the wood wide web functions in a forest is still not well understood, but scientists do know that the fungi forming these networks are important for keeping trees healthy.

Afterlife of a tree

Before it topples over, a dead tree can stand for many years, providing a safe home for bees, squirrels, owls and many more animals. Once it falls and becomes a log, it can host other living things, like badgers, moles and reptiles.

Logs also host a different kind of fungi and bacteria, called decomposers. These tiny organisms help break down big dead trees to the point where you would never know they had existed. Depending on the conditions, this process can take from a few years to a century or more. As wood breaks down, its nutrients return to the soil and become available for other living things, including nearby trees and fungal networks.

A tree leaves a legacy. While alive, it provides shade, home for many animals and a lifeline to fungi and other trees. When it dies, it continues to play an important role. It gives a boost to new trees ready to take its place, shelter to a different set of animals and, eventually, nourishment for the next generation of living things.

It’s almost as if a tree never truly dies but just passes its life on to others.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to emphasize that much remains unknown about the relationship between trees and fungi.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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When the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai volcano in Tonga exploded on January 15, 2022—setting off a sonic boom heard as far north as Alaska—scientists instantly knew that they were witnessing history. 

“In the geophysical record, this is the biggest natural explosion ever recorded,” says Ricky Garza-Giron, a geophysicist at the University of California at Santa Cruz. 

It also spawned a tsunami that raced across the Pacific Ocean, killing two people in Peru. Meanwhile, the disaster devastated Tonga and caused four deaths in the archipelago. While tragic, experts anticipated an event of this magnitude would cause further casualties. So why didn’t it?

Certainly, the country’s disaster preparations deserve much of the credit. But the nature of the eruption itself and how the tsunami it spawned spread across Tonga’s islands, also saved Tonga from a worse outcome, according to research published today in the journal Science Advances. By combining field observations with drone and satellite data, the study team was able to recreate the event through a simulation.

It’s yet another way that scientists have studied how this eruption shook Tonga and the whole world. For a few hours, the volcano’s ash plume bathed the country and its surrounding waters with more lightning than everywhere else on Earth—combined. The eruption spewed enough water vapor into the sky to boost the amount in the stratosphere by around 10 percent. 

[Related: Tonga’s historic volcanic eruption could help predict when tsunamis strike land]

The eruption shot shockwaves into the ground, water, and air. When Garza-Giron and his colleagues measured those waves, they found that the eruption released an order of magnitude more energy than the 1980 eruption of Mount St Helens.

“It literally rang the Earth like a bell,” says Sam Purkis, a geoscientist at the University of Miami in Florida and the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation. Purkis is the first author of the new paper. 

The aim of the simulation is to present a possible course of events. Purkis and his colleagues began by establishing a timeline. Scientists agree that the volcano erupted in a sequence of multiple bursts, but they don’t agree on when or how many. Corroborating witness statements with measurements from tide gauges, the study team suggests a quintet of blasts, each steadily increasing in strength up to a climactic fifth blast: measuring 15 megatons, equivalent to a hydrogen bomb.

Then, the authors simulated what those blasts may have done to the ocean—and how fearsome the waves they spawned were as they battered Tonga’s other islands. The simulation suggests the isle of Tofua, about 55 miles northeast of the eruption, may have fared worst: bearing waves more than 100 feet tall.

But there’s a saving grace: Tofua is uninhabited. The simulation also helps explain why Tonga’s capital and largest city, Nuku’alofa, was able to escape the brunt of the tsunami. It sits just 40 miles south of the eruption, and seemingly experienced much shallower waves. 

[Related: Tonga is fighting multiple disasters after a historic volcanic eruption]

The study team thinks geography is partly responsible. Tofua, a volcanic caldera, sits in deep waters and has sharp, mountainous coasts that offer no protection from an incoming tsunami. Meanwhile, Nuku’alofa is surrounded by shallower waters and a lagoon, giving a tsunami less water to displace. Coral reefs may have also helped protect the city from the tsunami. 

Researchers believed that reefs could cushion tsunamis, Purkis says, but they didn’t have the real-world data to show it. “You don’t have a real-world case study where you have waves which are tens of meters high hitting reefs,” says Purkis.

We do know of volcanic eruptions more violent than Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai: for instance, Tambora in 1815 (which famously caused a “Year Without a Summer”) and Krakatau in 1883. But those occurred before the 1960s when geophysicists started deploying the worldwide net of sensors and satellites they can use today.

Ultimately, the study authors write that this eruption resulted in a “lucky escape.” It occurred under the most peculiar circumstances: At the time of its eruption, Tonga had shut off its borders due to Covid-19, reducing the number of overseas tourists visiting the islands. Scientists credit this as another reason for the low death toll. But the same closed borders meant scientists had to wait to get data.

That’s part of why this paper came out 15 months after the eruption. Other scientists had been able to simulate the tsunami before, but Purkis and his colleagues bolstered theirs with data from the ground. Not only did this help them reconstruct a timeline, it also helped them to corroborate their simulation with measurements from more than 100 sites along Tonga’s coasts. 

The study team argues that the eruption serves as a “natural laboratory” for the Earth’s activity. Understanding this tsunami can help humans plan how to stay safe from them. There are many other volcanoes like Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai, and volcanoes located underwater can devastate coastal communities if they erupt at the wrong time.

Garza-Giron is excited about the possibility of comparing the new study’s results with prior studies, such as his own, about seismic activity—in addition to other data sources, likethe sounds of the ocean—to create a more complete picture of what happened that day.

“It’s not very often that we can see the Earth acting as a whole system, where the atmosphere, the ocean, and the solid earth are definitely interacting,” says Garza-Giron. “That, to me, was one of the most fascinating things about this eruption.”

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South Florida is bracing for more showers and storms today after the Fort Lauderdale region saw 25.91 inches of precipitation in a 24-hour period this week. On Wednesday afternoon, a supercell thunderstorm being fed by warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico stalled over the region, producing rainfall rates of more than three inches per hour at times, according to preliminary reports.

“You had this extreme warmth and moisture that was just feeding into the cell and because it had a bit of a spin to it, it was essentially acting like a vacuum and sucking all that moisture back up into the main core of the system,” meteorologist Steve Bowen told the Associated Press. “It just kept reigniting itself, essentially.”

[Related: Rain storms have gotten more intense across most of the US.]

During the peak of the rain, one month’s worth of rain fell in only one hour. Average rainfall for April 3 in Fort Lauderdale is three inches, and it’s been close to 25 years since the city saw 20 inches of rain in a month.

Homes and businesses in the city of around 200,000 residents were flooded, the streets were littered with abandoned cars, and the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport completely closed on April 12. The airport plans to reopen today.

Nearby communities of Hollywood, Dania Beach, and Lauderdale Lakes saw between 12 and 18 inches of rain in the same period, according to preliminary reports. Roughly 12 homes were damaged by an EF0 tornado in the city of Dania Beach, about five and a half miles south of Fort Lauderdale. While no injuries were reported, roofs were ripped off of several mobile homes.

A state of emergency was declared for Broward County on Thursday. The deepest standing water surveyed on Thursday was measured in the Edgewood neighborhood just north of the airport. The National Weather Service in Miami said that a still water mark of just over three feet was measured near Floyd Hull Stadium.

Emergency officials in Fort Lauderdale said about 600 people were taken to emergency shelters, some who had to climb through windows to escape flooded homes. Some of the roads that were passable on Wednesday became impassable on Thursday, as storms dropped another more rain on the waterlogged region.

[Related :What is a flash flood?]

“This amount of rain in a 24-hour period is incredibly rare for South Florida,” National Weather Service meteorologist Ana Torres-Vazquez told CNN. She added that a powerful hurricane would typically dump 20 to 25 inches of rain over more than a day and said that this week’s rainfall was a “1-in-1,000 year event, or greater.” This is a weather event so intense and rare that the chance of it happening in any given year is only 0.1 percent.

Climate change is making rain events like these worse. A 2022 study found that when it rains in the United States, the precipitation falls more fiercely than in decades past and that the intensity of rainfall has shifted from lighter periods of rain to more moderate and heavy deluges. 

To be prepared for flooding, especially as the US prepares for hurricane season, the American Red Cross recommends always having an evacuation plan ready and knowing your flood risk, and to prepare a “go-bag” with supplies and important documents.

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This article originally appeared in Grist.

Spring has sprung unusually early in the eastern United States. From parts of the Gulf Coast all the way up through southern New England, leaves are popping out of shrubs and trees days or even weeks ahead of schedule. Some areas are experiencing their earliest spring on record, which means communities are also enduring an unusually early allergy season. Experts say rising temperatures, among the most visceral consequences of unfettered fossil fuel combustion, play a role in this year’s accelerated spring. 

Phenologists — people who study biological life cycles — use two metrics to delineate the change in seasons: First bloom, when plants begin to flower, and first leaf-out, when leaves unfurl. This year, first bloom and first leaf-out started creeping up the East Coast between three and four weeks ahead of schedule. That’s not entirely unusual; natural variation in seasons results in an early spring every few years. But, in some places, spring arrived extremely early — earlier than any time in the past four decades. 

Parts of central Texas and the Louisiana coast, southern Arkansas, southern Ohio, the D.C. area, New York City, and the New Jersey coastline all clocked their earliest spring on record, said Theresa Crimmins, director of the National Phenology Network, a group that collects data on seasons and other natural cycles. The organization uses mathematical models that combine historical observations of first leaf and first bloom with temperature and weather data to predict when lilacs and honeysuckles, typically the first plants to turn green each year, will start becoming active. The group then compares that first growth to an average baseline from the three decades between 1991 and 2020. The network’s models show that spring arrived a full 20 days ahead of schedule in spots across the eastern U.S. The trend was particularly vivid in the mid-Atlantic region.  

Warmth has everything to do with when trees start budding and leaves begin opening. This year, an especially mild winter in the eastern U.S., plus a string of very warm days in recent weeks, created ideal conditions for an early-onset spring. “That’s really what caused things to get so far ahead of schedule,” Crimmins said. 

It’s tough to peg climate change to a particular early leaf-out in any one place, but evidence of anthropogenic warming is obvious in how the timing of seasons in the U.S. has changed in the past several decades. “There is a clear underlying trend over the long term toward progressively earlier starts to the spring season in much of the country, much of the eastern U.S. in particular,” Crimmins said. “That is the result of steadily increasing global average temperatures.” 

Earlier springs are associated with a host of problems for human health. Recent research shows that the lengthening growing season has led to an allergy season that is 21 percent more intense and 20 days longer, on average, in North America. Shortened winters allow insects that carry disease, such as ticks and mosquitos, to get active earlier and spread pathogens to other animals and humans. 

“There’s a good chance that if you’re a sufferer of seasonal allergies and live in the eastern two-thirds of the U.S., you’re already feeling the effects of an early bloom,” Ben Noll, a meteorologist who tracks weather in New York’s Hudson Valley, told Grist.  

And early spring is a nightmare for farmers across the country who are already struggling to adapt to rapidly shifting environmental conditions. Mississippi’s blueberry crop was imperiled a couple of weeks ago when a hard frost descended on the state after a spate of abnormally warm days caused blueberry bushes to bloom early. One farmer in the state estimated that the frost wrecked 80 percent of his crop. 

“These seasonal changes can make life particularly tough for farmers whose livelihoods depend on the weather and ultimately produce the food that we consume,” Noll said.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org.

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Water is quickly flooding back into California’s Tulare Lake Basin, engulfing towns and farms, submerging roads, and reviving a so-called phantom lake. Tulare was once the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi until settlers diverted its source rivers, forcing it to vanish by the mid-20th century. Now, it seems Tulare Lake is back with a vengeance. 

According to a 2007 study for the US Environmental Protection Agency, Tulare Lake was once a permanent feature of the San Joaquin Valley. It covered an estimated 790 square miles, creating a biodiverse wetlands ecosystem that encompassed approximately 10 percent of California. In the late 1800s, settlers began diverting Tulare’s tributaries for agricultural purposes, incrementally drying the lake and exposing nutrient-rich soil. 

[Related: Rain, storms, and mudslides batter California]

Now, the lake-turned-farmland is one of the most important agricultural regions in the state, worth an estimated $2 billion dollars in dairy products and crops like grapes, cotton, corn, alfalfa, almonds, and pistachios. While an influx of water is a relief to many in California, easing a years-long drought and refilling reservoirs, it spells disaster for regions like the Tulare Basin. Residents are already seeing vast amounts of water threaten their livelihoods—and it’s only just beginning. If current conditions keep up, says UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain,this may be the worst flood for the Lake Tulare Basin yet.

What is a phantom lake?

A phantom lake is a seasonal body of water, typically reviving during periods of intense precipitation. These lakes are usually not very deep, as far as lakes go: Prior to water diversion, Tulare was estimated to be about 37 feet deep. Shallow lakes dry up much faster than deeper ones, owing to their larger surface area to volume ratio, allowing the sun to heat up and evaporate the water quickly. The California Central Valley’s hot, arid climate makes its phantom lakes especially ephemeral. 

Owens Lake, 220 miles north of Los Angeles, is another ghost that has recently resurrected. The construction of Los Angeles’ aqueduct depleted the freshwater body by diverting its tributary in 1913, but the lake is now rapidly refilling for the first time in 110 years. 

Tulare Lake has a similar backstory. It comprises a natural watershed for the Sierra Nevada mountain range, which feeds meltwater through multiple rivers and into the basin. Today, levees and dams prevent water from entering the basin by diverting or blocking these rivers. Though, as evidenced by the recent storms, those systems can only do so much to prevent flooding in the face of an extreme influx of water.

Why is Tulare Lake flooding again?

Atmospheric rivers—long, narrow plumes of atmospheric moisture—are to blame for the region’s recent storms. They originate in the tropics, where warm air can take up much more water than in colder climates. Climate change is raising temperatures and the atmosphere’s capacity for holding water, amplifying storms in California and many parts of the world. 

Despite the already significant flooding, most of the water that will enter the Tulare Basin hasn’t done so yet, Swain explains. Plenty of snow can still melt and flow down from the Sierra Nevada mountain range.

Flood risk will likely rise across California following an uptick in extreme precipitation events, but the Tulare Lake area is the most vulnerable. With its low elevations and proximity to the Sierra Nevadas, “[the basin] is the place where we very strongly anticipate that flood risk will increase the most in a warming climate,” Swain says.

With global heating driving up temperatures and the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere, rain has begun to replace snow at high elevations and snowmelt has accelerated earlier in the year. Swain also points out that a much more severe flood could occur in a future scenario with slightly warmer temperatures, but the same amount of precipitation. Rain and snow create the flood, but rising temperatures intensify it.

Where is all the water coming from?

The Sierra Nevada mountain range lies east of the San Joaquin Valley. Each spring, as temperatures warm, the snowpack accumulated over the winter begins to melt. As it does so, gravity pulls meltwater down from the mountains and into the lowest regions of the valley—namely, the Tulare Lake Basin./p>

This year, the Sierra Nevada snowpack is three times larger than normal and still growing. As of April 4, 2023, the estimated snowpack for the southern Sierras is 302-percent above average.

“All of that water is eventually going to have to enter the San Joaquin watershed, and a lot of it’s going to pass through the Tulare Lake Basin,” Swain says. “That’s going to present some serious challenges—I mean bigger challenges than we’re currently seeing.”

In the coming weeks, the Tulare Lake Basin and larger San Joaquin Valley will, unfortunately, experience deeper and more widespread flooding.

“There’s just that much water up in the mountains, it can’t go anywhere else, right?” Swain adds. “… In the end, the water always wins.”

How long with the Tulare Lake flood last?

Tulare Lake is an isolated, shallow body of water. It has no tributaries or outlets, so whatever water enters the basin sits there until it evaporates. An impermeable layer of clay underneath the former lake prevents most water from exiting through the ground.

[Related: What is a flash flood?]

The lake has occasionally been revived in the past. In the last big flood event in 1982 and 1983, the second wettest period in recorded history in the area, the lake did not fully disappear until 1985, per the Fresno Bee. The amount of water that has already accumulated in this year’s flood could take months or even years to evaporate—and there’s still a lot of snow waiting to melt in the wings. As of April 5, current precipitation levels in the Tulare Lake Basin rival its wettest years on record, 1968 and 1969.

What are the solutions to the flooding?

Restoring natural floodplains, adding levee setbacks and recharge basins, and “essentially giving water more room to roam in places where we’ve pre-designated it so it doesn’t cause too many problems” are among the list of solutions for the Tulare Lake region and its residents, Swain says.

But implementing land use changes is easier said than done. The San Joaquin valley has a long history of water wars, and no single entity has the authority to make these changes. Private landowners are responsible for many of these decisions, leading to extralegal activity and political conflict.

“This is a very difficult problem legally, practically, and ethically, and I don’t think there are any obvious solutions,” Swain notes. “Even though there are some obvious land use changes that would help the broader problem, getting there and implementing them in an equitable way is far from a straightforward thing to do.”

It’s already too late to do anything this spring besides survive the influx of water and try to control the damage. The challenge now lies in long-term planning for future floods. Moving forward, local conversations about these decisions should be held, including Indigenous groups like the Yokut people who were forcibly removed from the area in the 1800s.

“We’re really in a tough spot where these are big problems that have been known for a long time,” Swain says. In the coming months, he expects water will inundate some places that are now dry. Not only that, but adding water to farmland that has been treated with fertilizers, pesticides, and other chemicals may mobilize contaminants. Farms with animal agriculture produce lots of fecal waste, threatening microbial contamination. Tulare County has already issued a health warning regarding floodwater contamination.

“It’s going to be a long spring for some in the San Joaquin Valley and the Tulare Basin, in particular,” Swain says.

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A wild weather weekend covering large swaths of the United States caused at least 32 deaths, scores of injuries, and leaving entire neighborhoods destroyed. According to the National Weather Service, there were nearly 100 reports of possible tornadoes on March 31 and April 1 in Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Delaware, Maryland, and New Jersey. 

[Related: Recovery begins after devastating tornadoes hit Mississippi’s Lower Delta.]

The governors of Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa all announced emergency or disaster declarations to help free up immediate funding and assistance for the communities most impacted by the storms. On April 2, President Joe Biden issued a major disaster declaration for Arkansas ahead of FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell’s trip to survey the damage in the state.

“While we are still assessing the full extent of the damage, we know families across America are mourning the loss of loved ones, desperately waiting for news of others fighting for their lives, and sorting through the rubble of their homes and businesses,” President Joe Biden said in a statement.

In already storm-weary Mississippi, at least one person was killed and four others were injured after storms rocked P​ontotoc County. Additional damage was reported in Lee, Tishomingo, and Desoto counties. Last week, at least 26 people were killed and much of the town of Rolling Fork was destroyed by an EF-4 tornado.

An EF-3 tornado roared through Pulaski and Lonoke counties in Arkansas, with estimated peak winds of 165 mph. Almost 2,600 structures in the state capital of Little Rock saw various degrees of damage, and about 50 people were sent to the hospital. 

“It’s unbelievable anytime that you see, literally, vehicles flying across the air, structures being flattened,” the mayor said. “Many people were not at their homes. If they were, it would have been a massacre,” Little Rock Mayor Frank Scott Jr. told CNN.

A tornado in Wynne, Arkansas killed at least four people and tore the town in half. The town is home to about 8,000 residents, and many homes were completely crushed and roofs removed. 

In Tennessee, the statewide death toll rose to 15 on Sunday, with three deaths in the city of Memphis alone. Officials in McNairy County, where at least seven people were killed, continued to search buildings on Sunday.

[Related: How science has made tornado forecasting better—but not perfect.]

A powerful storm struck Belvidere, about 65 miles northwest of Chicago killing one and injuring two during a concert with 260 people   at the Apollo Theatre. One concert attendee told WTVO she walked in just seconds before the roof came down. “The wind, when I was walking up to the building, it went from like zero to a thousand within five seconds,” said Gabrielle Lewellyn. 

On the East Coast, where tornadoes are more rare but still possible, Delaware saw its first tornado-related death in 40 years. At least four tornadoes were confirmed in central and southern New Jersey. 

The severe weather threat shifted to the Southern Plains on Sunday, where roughly 13 million people in northern Texas were at an enhanced risk for severe weather in the afternoon. Emergency sirens were activated in Dallas “due to large hail.” Both the Dallas Fort Worth International Airport and Dallas Love Field Airport issued ground stops.

The severe threat continues today near Jackson, Mississippi with multiple tornado warnings issued this morning.

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This article was originally featured on The Conversation.

As a deadly tornado headed toward Rolling Fork, Mississippi, on March 24, 2023, forecasters saw the storm developing on radar and issued a rare “tornado emergency” warning. NOAA’s Weather Prediction and Storm Prediction centers had been warning for several days about the risk of severe weather in the region. But while forecasters can see the signs of potential tornadoes in advance, forecasting when and where tornadoes will form is still extremely difficult.

We asked Chris Nowotarski, an atmospheric scientist who works on severe thunderstorm computer modeling, to explain why – and how forecast technology is improving.

Why are tornadoes still so difficult to forecast?

Meteorologists have gotten a lot better at forecasting the conditions that make tornadoes more likely. But predicting exactly which thunderstorms will produce a tornado and when is harder, and that’s where a lot of severe weather research is focused today.

Often, you’ll have a line of thunderstorms in an environment that looks favorable for tornadoes, and one storm might produce a tornado but the others don’t.

The differences between them could be due to small differences in meteorological variables, such as temperature. Even changes in the land surface conditions – fields, forested regions or urban environments – could affect whether a tornado forms. These small changes in the storm environment can have large impacts on the processes within storms that can make or break a tornado.

One of the strongest predictors of whether a thunderstorm produces a tornado relates to vertical wind shear, which is how the wind changes direction or speed with height in the atmosphere.

How wind shear interacts with rain-cooled air within storms, which we call “outflow,” and how much precipitation evaporates can influence whether a tornado forms. If you’ve ever been in a thunderstorm, you know that right before it starts to rain, you often get a gust of cold air surging out from the storm. The characteristics of that cold air outflow are important to whether a tornado can form, because tornadoes typically form in that cooler portion of the storm.

How far in advance can you know if a tornado is likely to be large and powerful?

It’s complicated. Radar is still our biggest tool for determining when to issue a tornado warning – meaning a tornado is imminent in the area and people should seek shelter.

The vast majority of violent tornadoes form from supercells, thunderstorms with a deep rotating updraft, called a “mesocyclone.” Vertical wind shear can enable the midlevels of the storm to rotate, and upward suction from this mesocyclone can intensify the rotation within the storm’s outflow into a tornado.

If you have a supercell and it has strong rotation above the ground, that’s often a precursor to a tornado. Some research suggests that a wider mesocyclone is more likely to create a stronger, longer-lasting tornado than other storms.

Forecasters also look at the storm’s environmental conditions – temperature, humidity and wind shear. Those offer more clues that a storm is likely to produce a significant tornado.

The percentage of tornadoes that receive a warning has increased over recent decades, due to Doppler radar, improved modeling and better understanding of the storm environment. About 87% of deadly tornadoes from 2003 to 2017 had an advance warning.

The lead time for warnings has also improved. In general, it’s about 10 to 15 minutes now. That’s enough time to get to your basement or, if you’re in a trailer park or outside, to find a safe facility. Not every storm will have that much lead time, so it’s important to get to shelter fast.

What are researchers discovering today about tornadoes that can help protect lives in the future?

If you think back to the movie “Twister,” in the early 1990s we were starting to do more field work on tornadoes. We were taking radar out in trucks and driving vehicles with roof-mounted instruments into storms. That’s when we really started to appreciate what we call the storm-scale processes – the conditions inside the storm itself, how variations in temperature and humidity in outflow can influence the potential for tornadoes.

Scientists can’t launch a weather balloon or send instruments into every storm, though. So, we also use computers to model storms to understand what’s happening inside. Often, we’ll run several models, referred to as ensembles. For instance, if nine out of 10 models produce a tornado, we know there’s a good chance the storm will produce tornadoes.

The National Severe Storms Laboratory has recently been experimenting with tornado warnings based on these models, called Warn-on-Forecast, to increase the lead time for tornado warnings.

There are a lot of other areas of research. For example, to better understand how storms form, I do a lot of idealized computer modeling. For that, I use a model with a simplified storm environment and make small changes to the environment to see how that changes the physics within the storm itself.

There are also new tools in storm chasing. There’s been an explosion in the use of drones – scientists are putting sensors into unmanned aerial vehicles and flying them close to and sometimes into the storm.

The focus of tornado research has also shifted from the Great Plains – the traditional “tornado alley” – to the Southeast.

What’s different about tornadoes in the Southeast?

In the Southeast there are some different influences on storms compared with the Great Plains. The Southeast has more trees and more varied terrain, and also more moisture in the atmosphere because it’s close to the Gulf of Mexico. There tend to be more fatalities in the Southeast, too, because more tornadoes form at night.

We tend to see more tornadoes in the Southeast that are in lines of thunderstorms called “quasi-linear convective systems.” The processes that lead to tornadoes in these storms can be different, and scientists are learning more about that.

Some research has also suggested the start of a climatological shift in tornadoes toward the Southeast. It can be difficult to disentangle an increase in storms from better technology spotting more tornadoes, though. So, more research is needed.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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At least 25 people are dead and dozens more are injured after powerful storms and an large tornado struck the Southeast this weekend. 

Officials from the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency have preliminarily given an EF-4 rating to the tornado that struck Rolling Fork and Silvery City, Mississippi on Friday March 24th. EF-4 tornadoes have top wind gusts of 166 to 200 miles per hour and represent only about two percent of all tornadoes. 

[Related: Why it’s so difficult to forecast a tornado’s path.]

The tornado was estimated three-quarters of a mile wide at some points, tearing 59 miles across Mississippi for more than an hour, according to the National Weather Service’s preliminary report. Fewer than 1 percent of tornadoes in the US traveled more than 50 miles between 1950 and 2021, according to an analysis of NWS data conducted by the Washington Post. This tornado was part of a supercell, or a rotating thunderstorm, that spawned several tornadoes on Friday. 

Rolling Fork Mayor Eldridge Walker told the Associated Press that the storm hit so quickly that the sheriff’s department barely had time to set off tornado sirens to warn the town of about 2,000 residents. “And by the time they initiated the siren, the storm had hit and it tore down the siren that’s located right over here,” Walker said, referring to an area blocks from downtown.

Local officials estimate that 80 to 85 percent of the town in the Mississippi’s Lower Delta region was destroyed, leaving hundreds of residents homeless. US Census data shows that over 80 percent of residents are Black and about 21 percent live below the poverty line, which is higher than the state average. Roughly 30 percent live in mobile homes, which are significantly more vulnerable to tornado damage, according to a 2018 study.

“It seemed like forever until that noise stopped. You could hear people screaming from the neighborhood,” Rolling Fork vice mayor LaDonna Sias told CNN. Sias also said that her house was demolished. 

The storms knocked out power to more than 83,000 homes and businesses across Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee by early Saturday morning, according PowerOutage.us. Power remains out to over 10,000 customers as of Monday morning.

On Sunday, President Joe Biden issued an emergency declaration for Mississippi, so that federal funds are available for recovery in the hardest hit area. Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves also pledged that more help was on the way at a news conference.

[Related: Deadly tornadoes reveal new disaster patterns in the Southeast.]

The Cajun Navy 2016, a volunteer search and rescue group from Louisiana were in both Silver City and Rolling Fork on Sunday helping residents salvage their possessing and sifting through debris

The recovery efforts continued despite more severe weather affecting 20 million people throughout the southeast via additional storms hitting Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Large parts of central and southern Mississippi saw thunderstorms and heavy rain, with some areas reporting tennis ball-sized hail.

Overnight severe weather can be particularly dangerous since people are less likely to receive warnings since they are asleep, and tornadoes can be more difficult to spot in the darkness. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) suggests enabling mobile emergency alerts, listening to a weather radio, and keeping an updated tornado plan.

The Mississippi Clarion Ledger has compiled a list of ways to help residents here.

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It’s officially the first day of spring in the Northern Hemisphere, which brings with it longer daylight, sneezy pollen from beautifully blooming trees and flowers, and warming temperatures. As the western United States continues to be pummeled by strong Pacific storms and drenching rains and snow, NOAA’s spring outlook is forecasting even more moisture to the drought stricken region. 

The abnormally wet winter has stopped the exceptional and extreme drought in California for the first time since 2020. Melting snowpack throughout the spring is expected to further improve the dry conditions. 

[Related: There are rivers in the sky—and one is causing raging rain over California.]

​“Climate change is driving both wet and dry extremes, as illustrated by NOAA’s observations and data that inform this seasonal outlook,” said NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad in a statement​​.

Last week, the 11th atmospheric river storm to hit California this season brought floods and landslides, but also enough rain to end water restrictions for almost 7 million people in southern parts of the state. The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California is the largest water supplier in the United States, serving up to 19 million people in six counties. The restrictions were put in place in 2022 due to the severe water shortage from persistent drought. 

“Southern California remains in a water supply deficit. The more efficiently we all use water today, the more we can keep in storage for a future dry year,” wrote One Water Committee Chair Tracy Quinn in a press release. “And as we face climate whiplash, dry conditions could return as soon as next year. Metropolitan is committed to helping residents save water through our expansive rebate and incentive programs.”

The NOAA spring outlook also predicts that spring wet season to improve drought conditions elsewhere in the United States, including parts of the central and northern Plains and Florida. 

Extreme and exceptional drought is forecast to persist in the southern high Plains and develop in parts of New Mexico, parts of the Northwest, and the northern Rockies. The Pacific Northwest and parts of the Southwest can also expect below average rainfall. 

True “April showers” are forecast this spring, with above-average precipitation expected in the Great Lakes, Ohio Valley, and parts of the mid-Atlantic and Northeast. Great Lakes, Ohio Valley, and into parts of the mid-Atlantic and Northeast. 

The highest flood risks from all of this rain includes the eastern half of the country and most of the Mississippi River Basin, as well as  high elevations of the Sierra Nevada mountains.

[Related: Powerful atmospheric river pummels California with even more rain and flooding.]

“Approximately 44 percent of the US is at risk for flooding this spring,” said Ed Clark, director of NOAA’s National Water Center. “California’s historic snowpack, coupled with spring rain, is heightening the potential for spring floods.”

This same spring snowmelt will bring some much welcomed water to Lake Powell, formed by the Glen Canyon Dam on the Arizona-Utah border, and Lake Mead, located behind the Hoover Dam on the Nevada-Arizona state line. These reservoirs in the Colorado River Basin are currently at record low water levels following years of persistent drought. In December 2022, Lake Mead was at 28 percent capacity, compared to 100 percent in mid-1999. Lake Powell was at 25 percent capacity today after last being full in June 1980.

On the temperature front, warmer than average temperatures are expected in large swaths of the southern and eastern half of the United States, as well as in Hawaii and northern Alaska. 

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Cyclone Freddy, a tropical cyclone that first formed over a month ago in the Indian Ocean, has finally dissipated. It leaves behind a trail of destruction, killing at least 326 people across southeast Africa and damaging thousands of homes. The month-long storm may have broken the record for longest-lasting tropical cyclone. 

The cyclone began off the coast of northwestern Australia and followed an unusual path, crossing into the Southern Indian Ocean. It is one of only four recorded storms to cross the southern Indian Ocean from east to west, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). 

[Related: What hurricane categories mean, and why we use them.]

“No other tropical cyclones observed in this part of the world have taken such a path across the Indian Ocean in the past two decades,” NOAA wrote in an article in February. 

Freddy traveled more than 4,970 miles and made landfall in Madagascar and Mozambique in Africa in late February. The storm then looped backward, and hit Mozambique for the second time  two weeks later after initial landfall before striking Malawi. 

In Madagascar, Mozambique, and Malawi, the death toll exceeded 300 people as of March 17. Over 700 people are injured, 40 are missing, and 80,000 are displaced by the storm. Landslides and severe flooding from at least 24 inches of rain swept away homes and buried roads in thick mud. 

Power outages have hindered rescue efforts and Malawi was in the midst of a deadly cholera outbreak. Health officials feared that floodwaters may exacerbate the situation and limit access to sanitation and safe drinking water. 

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology named the storm on February 6 and it finally came to an end on March 14. The cyclone was strong enough to be called a tropical system for at least 34 days. Confirmation from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is still needed before Freddy can be declared the longest-lasting recorded storm. Typhoon/Hurricane John, which meandered in the central and western Pacific Ocean for 31 days from mid-August to mid-September 1994. 

The WMO is forming a committee to see if Freddy broke this record based on accumulated cyclone energy (ACE). Freddy is already estimated to have had the equivalent energy of an entire hurricane season in North America.

The storm already broke 2016’s Cyclone Fantala’s record for all-time accumulated cyclone energy in the Southern Hemisphere. ACE is a measure of a storm’s strength over time and Freddy was the first storm in the Southern Hemisphere to undergo four separate rounds of rapid intensification. Rapid intensification means a cyclone’s maximum sustained winds increase at least 30 knots in one day. 

[Related: 5 emergency preparedness tips for hurricane season.]

At its strongest, Freddy was the equivalent of a Category 5 hurricane (winds over 160 miles per hour). Like many storms, Freddy was strongest over open waters and not on land, landing at a Category 3 in Madagascar and Mozambique.

While unusual, Freddy was the type of cyclone seen during a La Niña weather pattern in the Indian Ocean. A rare triple-dip La Niña began in September 2020 and was finally declared over by meteorologists this week. Increasingly warm ocean temperatures due to climate change could have played a role in Freddy’s rapid intensification and its slow movement, particularly during its second landfall in Mozambique.

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This article was originally featured on Task & Purpose.

Amid severe winter storms that have left parts of California flooded or trapped under feet of snow, the California National Guard is taking part in rescue efforts. That includes ongoing work to get supplies to people trapped in the snow covered San Bernardino Mountains, where many have been snowed in for two weeks.

Sixty California National Guard soldiers, part of Joint Task Force Rattlesnake, are deployed to the mountains, which include the towns of Lake Arrowhead, Crestline and Big Bear Lake. They’re helping local agencies as well as Caltrans and Cal Fire reach people who have been trapped for days. Heavy storms hit much of California hard last month. In the San Bernardino Mountains—with only limited access up and down, residents were unable to get down from their homes for days. Many were without power, and limited supplies. 

Snow plows only operated in a limited capacity, and it’s only in the last week that they have been able to get down the highway. Travel in and between mountain towns remains difficult, as roads remain blocked or partially blocked, and many people have to walk from their snow-covered homes in order to get to clear roads. 

Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency for the area on March 1 and the National Guard went into action. After more than a week of work, they and local partners have set up supply distribution centers spread out around the mountains (many stores remain closed; one grocery store in Crestline had its roof cave in from the weight of the snow). They’ve also been going house to house to try and reach people. 

“The primary goal was snow removal from private property from homes that had elderly individuals that were in danger of collapsing,” Chloe Castillo, a spokesperson for Cal Fire, told Task & Purpose. “They cleared off snow from critical infrastructure, including the Crestline post office, and a large hotel at Lake Arrowhead Village, the location that was housing a large number of first responders. They ended up removing […] 1.1 million lbs. of snow.”

Joint Task Force Rattlesnake typically deploys during the state’s fire season, helping to fight wildfires and evacuate people. The dozens of National Guard soldiers mobilized after the storms instead have to deal with floods and ice. 

The rescue efforts are expected to continue for several more days. Many residents still choose to walk to these places instead of driving as not only are side streets blocked but many cars remain trapped under layers of snow. It’s not clear exactly how many people in total have been injured or killed by the storm in the area.

An additional challenge is that since rescue efforts started, a new storm, driven by an atmospheric river, hit Southern California starting on Thursday, March 9. It is expected to last several days, dropping 1.5-2 inches of precipitation on the area. The added weight of rain on top of snow could add additional pressure on buildings, presenting structural risks. 

That need has been exacerbated by this week’s storms. Roughly 100 additional California National Guard soldiers are currently responding to flooding in other parts of the state, including Monterey and Santa Cruz counties, using high water vehicles to reach people in danger. In the last several days the National Guard has helped in 56 rescues, according to the force. They have also assisted in aid and supply efforts in the state as well. The latter has included airdropping hay for cows in northern Humboldt County.

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Seaweed is one of the most variable, sustainable substances on earth. Scientists have used it to make new plastics, medical devices, food, biofuels, and more. But right now, one variety of aquatic plant is also making a giant toxic bloom that can be seen from space. 

Meet the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt—a nearly 5,000-mile-long, thickly matted sheet of sargassum algae floating between Mexico and West Africa. Sargassum, a genus of large brown seaweed, is pretty much harmless —or even beneficial—out in the open ocean. But when it creeps up on beaches, it can be a serious problem. And it’s growing. 

While these seaweed mounds may serve as carbon sinks and fish habitats when floating asea, as the mass inches closer to land, it can diminish water and air quality, smother coral reefs, and restrict oxygen for coastal fish. Huge piles of the seaweed typically turn up on Florida beaches around May, but the seaweed is already starting to swamp beaches in Key West, Brian LaPointe, a research professor at Florida Atlantic University’s Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute, tells NBC. As of last week, 200 tons of the marine plant are expected to wash up on beaches in the Mexican Caribbean. 

[Related: This fossilized ‘ancient animal’ might be a bunch of old seaweed.]

With these pile-ups come even more pile-ups—of dead fish. According to the Independent, around 1,000 pounds of fish were cleared from Florida’s St. Pete Beach this month, and 3.5 tons of dead fish have already been removed in the past two weeks from the state’s Manatee County Parks.

The seaweed can be a huge problem for infrastructure. “Even if it’s just out in coastal waters, it can block intake valves for things like power plants or desalination plants, marinas can get completely inundated and boats can’t navigate through,” Brian Barnes, an assistant research professor at the University of South Florida’s College of Marine Science, tells NBC. Not to mention, one 2022 paper linked the hydrogen sulfide that rotting seaweed emits to serious pregnancy complications, alongside headaches and eye irritation. 

[Related: Horrific blobs of ‘plastitar’ are gunking up Atlantic beaches.]

While some types of seaweed make for awesome, sustainable products, this kind of sargassum is virtually useless. Using it as a fertilizer or compost is tricky, thanks to its high heavy metal content. Some scientists have argued for sinking the massive carpet of algae to the bottom of the ocean to use as carbon capture and storage. 

“There is a lot of carbon biomass associated with sargassum–about 3m tonnes in the Great Sargassum Belt,” Columbia University oceanographer Ajit Subramaniam tells The Guardian. 

For now, it’s probably best to keep an eye out for beach closures, event cancellations, and warnings as the season attracts more people—and smelly seaweed—toward the coast. 

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March has already brought chaos to the West Coast as back-to-back winter storms dropped an unseasonable 100 inches of snow in Southern California, causing at least one death and leaving residents trapped. But this weekend is set to bring even more precipitation as an atmospheric river comes for the whole state.

Currently, Northern and central California can expect a great deal of rain in the coming weekend, causing risky flood conditions. As the rain falls, it is bound to melt the unprecedented amounts of snow. Heavy, wet snow is expected at higher elevations, specifically in Northern California and the Sierra Nevadas, which will lead to deep snowpack and rough travel conditions, according to the National Weather Service. Most of California’s residents were already under weather warnings on Thursday night, and evacuations have already begun in counties such as Merced, Mariposa, and Santa Cruz. 

[Related: Earth’s natural air-scrubbing system works better when it’s wetter.]

“It could get really ugly,” David Rowe, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, told SFGate on Wednesday. “Probably most of the melt will be in the foothills. The snowpack is so deep in the higher elevations, even though we’re expecting a lot of rain, it will probably soak right in at the higher elevations.”

Governor Gavin Newsom had already issued a state of emergency due to weather conditions on March 1 for 13 different counties, but has since expanded the list to include 21 more counties in order to provide storm response and relief efforts to even more regions.

“The state is working around the clock with local partners to deploy life-saving equipment and first responders to communities across California,” Newsom said Thursday. “With more dangerous storms on the horizon, we’ll continue to mobilize every available resource to protect Californians.”

This unprecedented weather is the result of an atmospheric river that’s called a “Pineapple Express.” Atmospheric rivers in general are narrow regions of the atmosphere that bring water vapor from the tropics to the north. Once the 250-375 mile-wide stream of humid air hits landfall, they can bring a great deal of precipitation, but many are relatively weak. The Pineapple Express is especially powerful because the moisture is coming from Hawaii and the tropical Pacific, which can deal a serious blow to the West Coast, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. 

In general, some experts believe that atmospheric rivers are getting more powerful due to climate change. 

“This is an unrivaled, unparalleled weather event not experienced in several decades, perhaps back to 1969,” Kris Mattarochia, a science and operations officer at the National Weather Service, tells the New York Times.

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This article was originally featured on High Country News.

In the days after a record-breaking heat wave baked the Pacific Northwest in 2021, state and federal foresters heard reports of damaged and dying trees across Oregon and Washington. Willamette Valley Christmas tree farmers had lost up to 60% of their popular noble firs, while caretakers at Portland’s Hoyt Arboretum said Douglas firs, their state tree, dropped more needles than ever seen before. Timber plantations reported massive losses among their youngest trees, with some losing nearly all of that year’s plantings. 

The damage was obvious even to those who weren’t tasked with looking for it. Drivers, homeowners and tree experts alike called or sent photos of damaged redcedars, hemlocks and spruce, particularly in coastal forests. Swaths of the landscape were so scorched it looked like a wildfire had torn through.

Some farmers and homeowners had tried to prepare, dumping water on their orchards and yards before and during the heat wave. Many lost branches, leaves and entire trees anyway. “There’s a misconception out there that a lot of people have that, if things are just watered enough, they can get through these events,” said Chris Still, an Oregon State University tree ecologist and expert in tree heat physiology. “But the heat spells we’re talking about, like the heat dome, are so intense that I don’t think that’s really a tenable assumption anymore.” Simply watering trees during extreme heat makes intuitive and practical sense, but that idea is based largely on knowledge about droughts. After all, nearly all of the research on climate-related stress in trees has focused only on the impact of insufficient water. But it turns out that trees respond quite differently to extreme heat versus prolonged drought. Still’s own research, including a new study on the heat dome, is part of a growing body of work focused on untangling the effects of both conditions. Given that extreme heat and drought are both becoming more common and intense — and won’t always coincide — foresters and tree farmers will need tools to prepare for each.

The threat human-caused global warming poses to the Northwest’s forests was evident long before the 2021 heat dome: Oregon and Washington’s most common conifer species are all dying in alarming numbers, many because of drought. Starting in 2015, state foresters began warning that western hemlocks, a particularly drought-sensitive species common to the Coast Range and Cascades, were succumbing to pests and fungi that infested the already-stressed trees. More recently, foresters have seen widespread die-offs of western redcedar and Douglas firs. Aerial surveys in 2022 documented what foresters have dubbed “firmageddon” — the sudden death of 1.2 million acres of “true firs” (which include grand and noble firs, but not Douglas firs), mostly in Oregon.

“All of our trees are drought-stressed,” Oregon state entomologist Christine Buhl told HCN last July. “They can’t protect themselves against other agents” in their weakened state. Even common pests and native parasites that don’t normally kill trees are now proving lethal.

When the 2021 heat wave hit, foresters weren’t certain what new chaos it might bring. Drought affects tree stems and the structures that move water and nutrients around, but heat destroys needles and leaves. When those tender green structures heat up — and they often reach temperatures far higher than the air around them — they lose water fast. The tissues inside them fall apart, and they turn red or brown as their chlorophyll breaks down.

“Just like our skin, when (sun exposure) rips those cells apart and we have blisters and sunburn, it does the same exact thing to those needles and leaves,” said Danny DePinte, a forest health specialist who flies annual aerial surveys for the U.S. Forest Service in Washington and Oregon. The 2021 heat dome offered a rare glimpse of the results on a large scale: When DePinte flew over the region later that year, he saw whole landscapes of trees scorched on their south and west-facing sides, where temperatures would have been hottest. The worst damage occurred on southern slopes with prolonged exposure and in coastal forests that are adapted to far cooler temperatures. DePinte’s survey found that at least 229,000 acres of forest had been damaged by the heat wave — a figure state researchers say only begins to capture the total area damaged, which was likely much larger.

Research like Still’s, which drew in part on DePinte’s data, has made it clear that heat stress causes more immediate and acute damage than drought. Its long-term impacts are far less understood, though, because events like the 2021 heat dome are still unusual.

On his 2022 survey flights, DePinte found that the most obvious damage seems to have been temporary: Damaged areas are mostly green again with new growth. Further research, by Still’s team and others, will investigate possible lingering health effects, including whether the trees become more susceptible to pests, disease and death.

Researchers will also consider how foresters and tree farmers could respond, as extreme heat waves become more common. Adaptations might include planting certain species together to shade more vulnerable trees, determining which native trees are most tolerant to extreme heat, and planting species on farms or after wildfires that are already adapted to hotter conditions farther south.

“We need to be smart about what trees we’re planting so that we have forests in the same places,” DePinte said. “We’ve got to think hundreds of years into the future: What is this area gonna look like? And then plan accordingly.”

Update 02/28/23: This story was updated to remove a photo that showed a tree damage unrelated to the heat wave and to include a photo that shows the effects of acute hot weather injury.

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

A boulder weighing more than 40 tonnes sits on the sand high above the ocean. Dwarfing every other rock in view, it is conspicuously out of place. The answer to how this massive outlier got here lies not in the vast expanse of the Atacama Desert behind it but in the Pacific Ocean below. Hundreds of years ago, a tsunami slammed into the northern Chilean coast—a wall of water 20 meters high, taller than a six-story building, that swept boulders landward like pebbles.

The tsunami that lobbed this behemoth happened before written records existed in Chile. But we know about it today thanks to the detective work of a small group of researchers who are uncovering the signs of ancient tsunamis around the globe. Using a diverse array of scientific techniques, these paleotsunami researchers have found evidence of previously undocumented colossal waves. In the process, their work is revealing that coastal communities could be in far more danger from tsunamis than they realize.

As scientists expand their search, they have continued to find ancient tsunamis bigger than those found in historical records, says James Goff, a paleotsunami researcher at the University of Southampton in England. The implications are clear: if a huge tsunami happened once in a given location, it could happen again. The question is whether we’re prepared for it.

A tsunami is more than just a big wave. Conventional waves, even those tens of meters high, are usually generated by the wind and involve only the uppermost layers of water. They carry relatively little energy, and typically crash harmlessly on the shore.

A tsunami, by contrast, is spawned by geological forces—an earthquake, volcanic eruption, or the side of a mountain crashing into the sea. A tsunami involves the entire water column. While large tsunamis can measure 20 meters or more in height—with some particularly monstrous ones rising hundreds of meters—they need not be exceptionally tall to cause widespread damage. Instead of collapsing on the beach, a tsunami rushes ashore like a battering ram. After racing hundreds of meters or more inland, the water recedes into the depths, carrying away nearly everything in its path. But tsunamis almost always leave evidence of their passage—like an out-of-place boulder high in the desert.

Goff has been searching for ancient tsunamis for almost three decades, mostly in countries bordering the Pacific Ocean. He’s one of just a few scientists worldwide who specialize in finding evidence of paleotsunamis, or tsunamis that predate written records.

The easiest way to tell that a tsunami hit hundreds or thousands of years ago is to look underground, Goff says. When the wave recedes, it leaves traces of everything it contained strewn across the surface. This thin layer of silt, rocks, tiny shells, and other marine deposits gets buried over time, preserving the tsunami’s path between layers of sediment. In some places, the layers are so well preserved that researchers can see evidence of multiple tsunamis stacked on top of each other like a layer cake.

An excavation in Maui, Hawai‘i, shows four bands marking tsunami deposits. Scientists have yet to deduce when these tsunamis occurred. Photo by Scott Fisher

In southern Chile, you can dig a hole near many coastal rivers and count the bands. “One, two, three, four,” Goff says. “And you can just see these layers, and you know that they’re paleotsunamis.”

In places with rocky or more barren terrain, a paleotsunami’s track can be harder to discern, and the techniques used must be tailored to the environment. Goff and other researchers also look for microscopic marine organisms like diatoms and foraminifera, ancient DNA from marine life, changes to geochemistry, and, as in the Atacama, unexpected boulders.

That Atacama tsunami likely happened in 1420, says Tatiana Izquierdo, a paleotsunami researcher based at the University Rey Juan Carlos in Spain who helped to discover it. She and her colleagues dug underneath the boulder to find undisturbed sediment. They radiocarbon dated some of the marine shells they found, giving a range of potential dates from the 14th to the 16th centuries. With further research, the team found historical records of a tsunami in Japan in 1420 that fit with their dates. Izquierdo says their tsunami likely originated off the Chilean coast following a large earthquake and crossed the Pacific to Japan.

In other cases, paleotsunami researchers have drawn insights from the archaeological record. Izquierdo says archaeologists in Chile previously noted that suddenly, around 3,800 years ago, a number of coastal sites were systematically abandoned, with new sites soon appearing farther inland. Additional evidence, like shell middens that bore evidence of having been eroded by strong currents, hinted at a potential paleotsunami.

Those dates line up perfectly with a huge paleotsunami that Goff found evidence for an ocean away, in New Zealand, where boulders the size of cars had been tossed almost a kilometer inland. It’s a disaster that doesn’t appear in historical records, Goff says, and it’s a tsunami that likely affected islands all across the South Pacific, including in Vanuatu, Tonga, and the Cook Islands. Paleotsunami researchers have yet to look for corroborating evidence on those islands, so they don’t yet know the full scale of the destruction it caused.

Finding out how big and how bad a paleotsunami was is more than a matter of historical interest. That data has a lot of value for contemporary coastal communities.

Predicting tsunamis is impossible. At best, residents might have minutes to hours of warning from agencies like the National Tsunami Warning Center in the United States and Canada that use buoys and seismometers to detect potential tsunamis before they reach land. The resulting alerts are based on computer models fed data on how past tsunamis behaved. If they’re missing key events that don’t show up in the historical record—like the ones paleotsunami researchers are steadily uncovering—the warnings may not be fully accurate.

Goff points to the 2011 Tōhoku tsunami in Japan as a prime example of the perils of ignoring evidence of past events.

That 2011 tsunami, generated by a Magnitude 9.0 earthquake in the seafloor off Japan, spawned waves up to 40 meters high that traveled as far as 10 kilometers inland. The water overwhelmed sea walls and inundated more than 100 designated tsunami evacuation sites. It destroyed entire towns and crippled the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. More than 15,000 people died.

Part of the problem was Japan’s inadequate defenses. Researchers knew of three large tsunamis from historical records dating back as far as the 17th century, one of which produced waves nearly as tall as the 2011 tsunami. Yet officials based their tsunami defense preparations, including the construction of a sea wall and the location of tsunami evacuation zones, on a 1960 tsunami generated by an earthquake on the Chilean coast that produced waves in Japan just six meters tall.

“We knew how big they could be [in Japan]. We knew that these things must have been generated just off the Japanese coast. And yet, we were completely unprepared for it,” Goff says.

The 2011 Tōhoku tsunami was more destructive than nearly any other in modern times. But as paleotsunami research is showing, it was hardly unprecedented.

Back in Chile, Izquierdo says she’s particularly worried about what would happen if a tsunami comparable in size to the one that flung boulders into the Atacama Desert hit today. In popular vacation spots, like outside the city of Caldera, people have built homes right near the beach. Should a tsunami hit, those homes could be in grave peril.

Paleotsunami researchers are revealing that the tsunamis we don’t know about were often more destructive than the ones we do. Those disasters may have happened thousands of years ago, and those locations may never see such big waves any time soon. But somewhere, sometime, we will.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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Over 65 million people across 29 states from California to Maine are under winter weather alerts today. A powerful coast-to-coast storm is moving across the entire United States and it won’t wrap up until Friday. Severe icing, sleet, and extreme cold are likely to impact travel and cause power outages. 

The storm will move east along a zone of contrasting temperatures, with record-challenging warm air to the south and cold air associated with the polar vortex to the north.  

[Related: 10 winter survival tips everyone should know.]

In the West, strong winds tore down power lines and knocked out electricity for more than 140,000 homes and businesses in northern California. The state is still bracing for several feet of snow in the mountains, according to the National Weather Service (NWS) in Los Angeles. The deluge follows nearly two months of deadly flooding from multiple atmospheric rivers dumping rain on the drought stricken state.

Blizzard-like conditions shut down parts of Interstate 80 in Wyoming on Tuesday, with close to 115 miles of Interstate 25 shut down as well. 

The Upper Midwest is expected to see the most snow from the storm. The Twin Cities area in Minnesota is expected to pick up at least 15 inches of snow by Thursday and possibly over two feet over next two days, which would break the previous record for snowfall from a single February storm (13.8 inches). The National Weather Service (NWS) called the three-day storm “historic” and forecast that it “will bring widespread accumulating snow, with blowing and drifting snow mainly Wednesday through Thursday.” The snow paired with gusty winds will make travel dangerous and Governor Tim Walz directed the state’s transportation department, national guard, and state patrol to be ready for severe impacts. 

Icing conditions are expected to begin in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Detroit, Michigan, and from northern Illinois to the southern tier of New York and into New England Wednesday. 

Snow, ice, and rain are expected to be more spread out in the Northeast, with icing expected more on elevated surfaces in central portions of Pennsylvania, New York’s lower Hudson Valley, and central portions of New England. Major metropolitan areas like New York and Philadelphia should see rain with some icy mixing later, and it’s all rain for Washington DC and Baltimore. 

[Related: Persisting winter storm conditions bring snow, tornadoes, and thunder to Eastern US.]

Northern parts of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine should see the heaviest snowfall of anywhere in the country at a range of 12 to 18 inches. Coastal Maine and Upstate New York could also see six to 12 inches of snow. 

On the warmer side of the temperature line, severe thunderstorms, damaging winds, and rain are expected in parts of Oklahoma, western Arkansas, Missouri, and western Illinois throughout Wednesday.  

Ahead of a winter storm, the American Red Cross recommends monitoring local weather reports, having emergency supplies that include extra blankets and warm fluids, and avoiding travel until after the worst weather is over. 

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Despite a series of devastating rain storms during December 2022 and January 2023, large portions of the western United States are still experiencing drought conditions. The US is just one of multiple countries facing abnormally dry conditions that are being exacerbated by human-made global warming. 

[Related: The nation’s largest water supplier declares a ‘drought emergency’ ahead of 2023.]

The eastern Horn of Africa (Somalia, Ethiopia, and Kenya) is forecast to face a sixth consecutive poor rainy season this spring which is intensifying the worst drought the region has seen in 40 years. (There are typically two rainy seasons per year: March to May and October to December.)

The drought is primarily due to a combination of warmer temperatures changing the climate and a weather phenomenon called La Niña. La Niña can temporarily reconfigure weather patterns around the globe and bring more rainfall to places such as Indonesia and Australia while reducing rain in eastern Africa.

In August 2022, a rare third consecutive La Niña was forecast by the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization (WMO). “The worsening drought in the Horn of Africa and southern South America bears the hallmarks of La Niña, as does the above average rainfall in South-East Asia and Australasia. The new La Niña Update unfortunately confirms regional climate projections that the devastating drought in the Horn of Africa will worsen and affect millions of people,” said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas in a statement. 

A separate WMO report from November 2022 showed that the La Niña conditions are persisting. 

The drought has triggered widespread food insecurity, with Somalia on the brink of famine. Over 1.3 million people in Somalia have been forced to leave their farms and seek food elsewhere.  In Kenya, meteorologists pointed to climate change’s involvement in the crisis.

“It is time we started including climate change as a factor in our development plans. The current drought which we warned about some years ago has wider ramifications on the social economic conditions of the region including peace, security, and political stability,” Evans Mukolwe, former director of the Kenyan and UN weather agencies, told The Associated Press.

[Related: La Niña is likely back for another unpredictable winter.]

Countries in South America are also facing similar La Niña driven dryness. Since 2019, the central region of the continent has seen drought conditions. Neighboring Uruguay declared an agricultural emergency in October 2022 and the drought has also hit Argentina’s soy, corn, and wheat crops. The country is the world’s top exporter of both soy oil and meal and third for corn and the dry conditions have led to sharp cuts in harvest forecasts. 2022 was Central Argentina’s driest year since 1960. 

Scientists from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) conducted a rapid report on the drought, concluding that climate change is not directly reducing the rainfall here, but the high temperatures are likely worsening the already dry conditions. Last week, Argentina and surrounding countries saw a heat wave which quickly evaporated some of the precipitation that had fallen during January and earlier this month. 

“Higher temperatures in the region in late 2022, which have been attributed to climate change, decreased water availability in the models,” the WWA wrote in their report. “Climate change probably reduced water availability over this period, increasing agricultural drought, although the study could not quantify this effect.”
WWA uses observations and climate models to see if climate change factors are present in extreme weather and compare what is happening now with what has happened in the past.

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ChatGPT’s cousin was just hired by NASA. On February 1, NASA and IBM announced a new partnership between the two major organizations, aimed at applying artificial intelligence (AI) tools to climate science, scanning research literature for quick answers and identifying features in Earth science data.

This is far from NASA’s first foray into artificial intelligence, or even the agency’s first collaboration with IBM. In 2014, NASA collaborated with the tech giant to infer measurements of the sun’s extreme radiation when a sensor failed on the Solar Dynamics Observatory. A year later, NASA started a summer bootcamp to bring scientists together with Silicon Valley engineers, known as the Frontier Development Lab. 

Plus, since the dawn of machine-learning techniques, scientists across NASA’s domains have been using these tools in their own projects, from looking at the sun to designing autonomous data-gathering robots. As AI has grown in power and complexity, though, it has become harder for individual researchers to harness the full potential of these tools. Each time they start a new project, many NASA engineers and scientists build a bespoke model for each dataset. To solve that problem, in 2020, NASA hosted a workshop on AI. It sought answers to large-scale, extra-challenging problems, dreaming bigger than one-off models for each problem—and IBM’s tech seemed like a perfect match for their needs.

“We have all heard and seen the magic” of widely-applicable machine learning models, especially language models like ChatGPT, said IBM lead developer Priya Nagpurkar in a press conference. “We are at this unique point where it’s time to take those advances and apply them to different domains…as well as advancing science.”

[Related: Is ChatGPT groundbreaking? These experts say no.]

This collaboration is the first time a particular kind of AI—a flexible, broadly-applicable technique known as a foundation model, which IBM is at the forefront of developing—has been applied to Earth sciences. “While NASA and IBM have discussed using AI to solve various problems for the past few years, IBM’s foundation model research was the catalyst for the current collaboration,” says IBM representative Danielle Cerasani.

As described in a recent press release, the collaboration plans to tackle two main projects: answering questions based on scientific literature, and analyzing large datasets of Earth to identify patterns and trends. NASA is providing access to its vast collection of Earth-observing data and its scientists, while IBM is adding AI development expertise and their existing research into this tech.

The literature search is based on technology similar to ChatGPT, and NASA hopes it will serve as a sort of ultra-advanced search engine for scientists.One of its key selling points is that its answers will come with citations—direct links to the research papers it’s pulling information from—unlike other tools that act more like a mysterious black box.  Rahul Ramachandran, senior research scientist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, said in a press conference this technology could be ready as early as mid-2023. 

Still, some scientists are skeptical. “The ability of the model to summarize information and answer questions, which is the most innovative aspect especially for the broader community, is also at higher risk of bias,” says Viviana Acquaviva, physicist and AI specialist at the City University of New York. “We have seen how state-of-the-art models like ChatGPT can easily produce biased or incorrect answers, while sounding plausible and confident.” In an advertisement for Google’s new Bard chatbot, for instance, the AI incorrectly stated that the James Webb Space Telescope imaged the first exoplanet, when the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope had done so years prior.

[Related: How old is Earth? It’s a surprisingly tough question to answer.]

Meanwhile, applying AI to Earth observations is the more scientifically interesting half of the collaboration, at least to Acquaviva. NASA hosts the world’s largest archives of data on our planet—enough to fill around a million typical iPhones—and they hope to sort it more effectively with IBM’s models.

“Our archive is currently at 70 petabytes and it’s projected to grow within a few years to 250 petabytes…We support 7 billion users worldwide who access our data for research and applications,” Ramachandran told reporters. “Clearly, given the scale of the data that we have, we have a big data problem.” 

With the new AI tech, they hope to easily track weather and natural disasters across the planet—as diverse as tornado tracks to dust clouds. Ramachandran imagined a scenario where a disaster response team could quickly analyze the extent of flooding after a hurricane, enabling faster and more effective emergency aid. The team plans to first analyze a data set known as Harmonized Landsat Sentinel-2, a combination of observations from two powerful NASA satellites. This work has just started, however, with Ramachandran describing it as an “open area” of research.

The collaboration also intends to publicly release the code and other tools they develop through these projects, making them available to anyone interested in their use. “It is exciting to witness progress toward the creation of an inclusive and interdisciplinary community,” Acquaviva says, “that can make climate data and AI tools more accessible to scientists and the public.”

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A few weeks ago, Mark Leary and his crew began to plow the snow off the frozen Kuskokwim River in southwest Alaska. Every year, once the river freezes and the snow is cleared from the ice, dozens of trucks, snowmobiles and other vehicles from more than 17 different villages whiz back and forth atop it. This is the Kuskokwim ice road, whose main stem can extend over 300 miles, connecting the bulk of the region’s population.

“Oh my gosh, you gotta see it with your own eyes,” said Leary, the director of operations for the road and an employee of the Native Village of Napaimute, the entity that leads the effort to establish and maintain it. “The traffic on it is huge. There’s a steady stream of vehicles all day long going up and down on the ice road.” 

There has been an ice road of some sort on the Kuskokwim River since vehicles first arrived in the region. But Leary said the tribe saw a need to begin maintaining it about a decade ago to facilitate transportation of wood products during the winter, and to keep the route safe and clear for the thousands of residents who live along the river. Now, however, a changing climate and more erratic winter storms are making ice roads like this one less reliable and harder to keep safe and passable all winter long.

Frozen rivers provide a relatively smooth and solid corridor for traveling in the North. They have been used for thousands of years and still connect rural communities across the state. Today, most residents and businesses along the Kuskokwim use the ice road to carry mail and freight, get to the hospital or clinic, and even transport school basketball teams to games in nearby villages. There is no other road connecting the communities; without it, people would have to rely on air travel, which isn’t always an option because of bad weather or exorbitant costs.

“This is a real road,” Leary said. “It is real, and it’s a necessity, not a novelty.”

Ice roads are also important for industry in the Arctic, especially on Alaska’s North Slope, where resource companies use them so operators can avoid driving on tundra when traveling between base camps and exploration and development sites. “The ice roads you see on TV, they have an industry behind them — oil companies and mining companies,” Leary said. “This road that we plow on the Kuskokwim River is for the people who live here. For the few months that it exists, it makes life much more convenient and much, much cheaper.”

Adrian Boelens, who has lived in the Yup’ik village Aniak her whole life, said she uses the ice road a lot. “I remember a time when my little brother-in-law broke a tooth,” Boelens said. “We have a clinic (in Aniak), but their medical services are limited. Bethel” — a major hub in the region — “has the next biggest hospital, and that’s easiest to access. He had to go down with a truck to get his tooth repaired so he didn’t lose the tooth.”

Boelens and her family also use the ice road to go ice fishing, visit friends, travel to nearby villages for basketball tournaments, and drive to Bethel to buy appliances, recreational gear and raw materials, like lumber. “Getting that stuff thrown in with air carriers is expensive,” she said. “Utilizing the ice road for that is a huge benefit. We had a water pump go out once, but we drove down to Bethel with our truck to pick up a water pump because it was just cheaper and easier.”

Leary and the dozen or so people on his crew maintain the ice road with three graders and three plow trucks. The annual cost depends on inflation, weather and how many miles the crew can plow. In past years, the Kuskokwim River ice road has cost more than $300,000 to maintain, Leary said. This year, he added, it may be more, since fuel has surged to about $9 a gallon, and the markers used to guide drivers have doubled in price, from $16 two years ago to $32 this year.

For most of the last decade, maintenance costs have been covered by donations from residents, businesses, city governments, tribal governments, village corporations and the regional corporation in the area. “We reached out to everybody along the river to help pay for it, and the support was huge,” Leary said. “One time, it almost made us cry. We were plowing back to Kasigluk, 50 miles below Bethel. The people of Kasigluk literally passed the hat, pitching in $5, $10, $20 each — whatever they could afford. When we got out there in the middle of the night, they came down to the river with an envelope in their hand. Their contribution was like $300-something. It paid for one guy’s wages.”

In recent years, Leary and his crew have advocated for more state support. Every state entity in the area uses the ice road, including the Alaska State Troopers. Each time Leary saw a trooper on the ice road, he took a picture and emailed it to state officials. After that, Leary said, the state contributed 4,000 uniform trail markers — used to designate villages, hazardous areas and even scenic views — fulfilling the crew’s “longtime dream,” Leary said. Before, they marked the road with whatever they had, including tree branches. Now, people can easily tell when they’re on the official ice road.

Last year, the Alaska Legislature began giving the crew a grant to help cover the costs of maintaining the ice road. This year, the crew is also, for the first time, receiving federal money: Lawmakers included ice road maintenance funds, distributed through a state program called Safe Ice Roads for Alaska, in a 2021 trillion-dollar federal infrastructure bill. The program allows entities to apply for up to $500,000. As a result, Leary’s crew is operating on full public funding this year.

But money isn’t Leary’s only worry. Unprecedented weather and warming from climate change are shortening the ice road’s season and hampering its reliability; warm winter storms can thaw rivers in places, making ice roads hazardous or impassable. According to the Alaska Department of Resources, Division of Lands, the winter tundra travel season on the North Slope has shrunk from about 200 days in the 1970s to about 120 days in the early 2000s.

“What I’ve observed is we have lost our pattern,” Leary said. “There’s no reliable seasonal pattern.” It used to be that the river would be frozen by mid-October; not anymore. “There’s just nothing that we can count on. We don’t know from year to year. We just don’t know. We watch and observe, and deal with it.”

Note: This story has been updated to correct that Mark Leary is an employee of the Native Village of Napaimute, not a tribal member.

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A multi-day, cross-country storm system spawned more than a dozen reported tornadoes in parts of Louisiana and Texas on Tuesday, damaging multiple homes and businesses. 

The communities of Deer Park and Pasadena, Texas near the city of Houston saw extensive damage, with downed trees and power lines. 

[Related: Strong storms and strange weather patterns sweep the US.]

“We’ve seen plenty of damage. We’ve seen buildings that have collapsed,” Pasadena Mayor Jeff Wagner told CNN.

Over 100,000 homes and businesses in Texas and Arkansas were without power as of Wednesday morning, and new tornado watches have been issued for southeastern Alabama and the Florida panhandle. 

Parts of the Southeast from the eastern Carolinas to southern Georgia can also expect potentially severe thunderstorms as the storm continues to move east.

To stay safe during a tornado, be sure to listen to local weather reports (especially during thunderstorms), be ready to shelter in the lowest part of your home or office, and have a plan and emergency kit. 

The same system is bringing snow to parts of the Midwest and interior Northeast. The National Weather Service (NWS) tweeted “a winter storm will produce a swath of heavy snow from the Middle Mississippi Valley & Great Lakes this morning to the Northeast this afternoon. An icy wintry mix is also expected for portions of the Interior Northeast. Hazardous travel conditions are likely in impacted areas.”

[Related: Stormy weather brings tornadoes and blizzards across the US.]

AccuWeather predicts that a wide swath of three to six inches of snow could accumulate from southern Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, and southern Michigan to Pennsylvania and New York to Maine. Northern New York into interior parts of Maine could see more than a foot of snow before the snow wraps up Thursday night.

Some gusty winds following behind the storm will allow some snow showers to linger from Michigan and northern Indiana, to West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York. 

Areas closer to the coast will only see rain beginning on Wednesday morning, as warmer air surges north. Some areas could see up to two inches of rain. As of Tuesday January 24, New York City has gone 321 days without measurable snowfall, the second longest snow drought in the city’s history. Some snowflakes may fall on Wednesday, before quickly changing over to rain.

“With the exception of some areas downwind of Lakes Erie and Ontario, and very small areas of interior New England, the East is certainly in a snow drought with some locations that normally have snow, down by as much as one to more than three feet,” the Weather Prediction Center Branch Chief Greg Carbin told CNN.

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Located just north of Atlanta, Georgia, Dobbins Air Reserve Base is usually home to C-130 transport planes. But for the next few weeks, the base will host an unusual guest: a white-painted jet that can fly for more than half a day at the edge of space.

The ‘Earth Resources 2’ jet is used by NASA for studying hurricanes, testing satellite systems, and a range of other scientific purposes. Military aviation observers may be more familiar with its cousin, the all-black Air Force U-2 spy plane that has collected intelligence photos for the U.S. government since the 1950s. 

Turns out, the so-called ‘Dragon Lady’ is good for more than just collecting information on enemy forces: it is also great at studying the forces of nature.

“NASA ER-2s have played an important role in Earth science research because of their ability to fly into the lower stratosphere at subsonic speeds, enabling direct stratospheric sampling as well as virtual satellite simulation missions,” NASA says of the jet. 

It makes sense that a spy plane works well as a science plane. After all, part of the reason why the U-2 is still in Air Force service 67 years after its first flight is due to its adaptability. The aircraft is basically a massive glider that can carry large payloads of sensors, cameras and other tools for gathering information.

“It’s just a glider with a big motor stuffed up its ass,” a former U-2 pilot, retired Col. Michael “Lips” Phillips, said on the Fighter Pilot Podcast in October 2020. “The reason it’s still used every single day is all the crap that we got on the most sophisticated spy satellites in the world can be put on a U-2. And the bad guys don’t know when it’s coming.”

Unlike satellites, which travel in predictable orbits around the Earth, the U-2 can fly whenever it is needed at a very high altitude. The U-2 often flies at 70,000 feet (13 miles) and above, while commercial airliners usually fly at around 31,000 and 38,000 feet (6 to 7 miles), according to Time. That high up, you can see the curve of the Earth, the movement of the night sky across the planet, and the tiny shapes of airliners beneath you, one U-2 pilot, identified only as Maj. Chris, said in 2020. 

Meanwhile, the ER-2 usually flies between 20,000 to 70,000 feet, NASA wrote. At that altitude, the ER-2 can test out the sensors that scientists want to use on satellites, which means they can find and address any bugs in the system without the cost of launching a faulty satellite into space.

The ER-2 has deployed to six continents to study everything from global warming to ozone depletion, according to NASA. That work benefits not just the space agency, but also the U.S. Forest Service, Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Army Corps of Engineers.

The agency used to operate straight-up U-2s starting in 1971 until it acquired its first ER-2 in 1981, followed by the second in 1989. Together the U-2s and ER-2s “have flown more than 4,500 data missions and test flights in support of scientific research,” NASA wrote.

The ER-2 flies at altitudes where the air pressure is so low that an unprotected pilot’s blood would literally boil. To prevent that, ER-2 pilots wear pressurized suits that are nearly the same as the ones worn by NASA astronauts on the way to orbit and back, ER-2 pilot Donald “Stu” Broce told WIRED Magazine in 2017.

Broce, who used to land F-14 fighter jets on aircraft carriers as a Navy pilot, said flying the ER-2 is a difficult task.

“Everything about the plane is kind of hard to do,” he told WIRED. “I call it the circus, everything about the plane is unique.”

[Related: The spy agency origins of NASA’s next powerful planet-hunting observatory.]

One of the odd things about the ER-2 is the pair of wheels that keep the plane’s huge wings off the runway. When the plane takes off, the wheels are designed to fall away and not be used again until the next flight. 

Once airborne, the flight itself can last eight, 10 or even 13 hours, as Broce has experienced. To stay energized, pilots bring an edible substance similar to baby food, which they eat through a tube that connects to their suit helmet.

The suit may sound uncomfortable, but there is quite an office view.

“The views are beautiful, there is no weather, you see the curvature of the Earth,” Broce said.

The most difficult part of flying the U-2 and the ER-2 comes at the end of the long flight, where pilots have to bring the lumbering aircraft to a stop using just the two wheels arranged bicycle-style on its belly, a dicey proposition even for a former carrier pilot.

“Every plane in the world, at some point in the landing you can give up and relax and you’re done and all you have to do is roll out and use the brakes,” Broce told Flying Magazine in 2015. “The U-2 wasn’t like that at all. You have to fly the plane until it stops on the runway. And it doesn’t handle crosswinds well and it’s on bicycle gear.”

To help with the landing, a fellow U-2 or ER-2 pilot in a chase car pursues the jet down the runway, guiding the landing pilot to a halt. For the next few weeks, airmen at Dobbins will get to enjoy that sight as the ER-2 there returns from missions tracking severe weather. The ER-2 will be based there until about March 5, the base said in a press release.

Whether it is climate change, the ozone layer, the nuclear-armed Soviet military or other things that could end all life on earth, the U-2 and the ER-2 always seem to be around to keep an eye on it for the U.S. government. The aircraft will likely continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

“The handful of airplanes that we have, we’ve got about three dozen left, they fly every day,” Phillips, the retired U-2 pilot, said in 2020. “Somewhere in the world, some agency of the government needs something, and the U-2 flies all the time.”

Special thanks to The Flyby newsletter where we first learned of this story.

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There’s a reason lightning rods haven’t changed much since Benjamin Franklin’s literally electrifying 18th century experiments—they work pretty well as is. Typically composed of a metal rod anchored directly into the ground via metal cabling, the simple, scalable device directs lightning bolts that are often five-times hotter than the sun’s surface into the Earth, where the charge can safely dissipate.

Still, lightning strikes can cause billions of dollars of infrastructural damage each year, leading one research team in Switzerland to recently develop a breakthrough method in diverting the electrical discharges away from sensitive structures. In essence, the scientists propose firing extremely powerful laser beams into the heart of a thunderstorm.

[Related: How to prevent a lightning strike.]

As detailed on Monday in the research journal Nature Photonics, alongside rundowns from The Guardian and elsewhere, the group of scientists recently set up a laser array near a 124m telecom tower atop Switzerland’s Säntis mountain. The structure is the recipient of over a hundred lightning strikes annually, making it a prime attractor for the experiment. Between July and September of last year, the lasers fired into a number of stormfronts over a total of six hours. According to researchers’ measurements, the laser pulses influenced the course of four upward discharges, although only one took place in clear enough conditions to photograph using high-speed cameras. Still, the lightning’s path in that instance appears to have been diverted around 50m towards the laser beam.

The system works thanks to the lasers’ ability to forge a more convenient path for lighting to travel towards the Earth. The surrounding air’s refractive index changes as the pulses fire at over 1,000 times per second into the storm clouds, making them contract and intensify so much that they ionize surrounding air molecules. A channel of ionized, low density air is then created from the air molecules quickly heating and spreading at supersonic speeds. Although these “filaments” as researchers describe them only last mere milliseconds, their conductivity compared to surrounding air make a much easier path for lightning arcs. Early indications also point to the laser lightning rods’ diversion range being much wider than traditional metal rods, which ostensibly cover an area about twice as wide as the rod is tall.

[Related: A new energy weapon combines multiple laser beams.]

There are some immediate drawbacks to this new system, however. For one, the laser pulses are (perhaps unsurprisingly) extremely bright, and could easily pose issues for any potential nearby pilots—hence closing the airspace around the experiment during its runtime. Then there’s the system’s roughly $2 million price tag during the experiment’s five year development that eventually saw the enlisting of Switzerland’s largest helicopter to help build the laser system’s home atop Säntis. All of that makes it very unlikely to see laser lightning rods atop suburban homes thanks to the  comparatively very cheap land-based rod.

That said, such a system could be more cost-effective for places like military bases, extremely tall structures, and spaceports with generally far more expensive repair costs than the average home following lightning strikes.

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When it comes to placing temples for notoriously moody gods, being literal can come in handy. If you’re a fan of Greek mythology, perhaps it will come as no surprise that a temple to the god of the seas was recently discovered in a location noted for its repeated run-ins with tsunamis. 

The temple of Poseidon may have finally been uncovered by a team of scientists at the Kleidi site near Samikon, an ancient village on the Peleponnesian peninsula of Greece. This area was once known to be the location of the sanctuary of Poseidon, alongside some wild weather events. Now, researchers suspect this newly found temple-like structure within the sanctuary could be the very one dedicated to Poseidon, as described 2,000 years ago by Greek historian Strabo.

[Related: These intricate ‘living’ paintings are teeming with microscopic organisms.]

According to earlier reports, the building dates back to the sixth century B.C.E , and was around 30 feet wide, at least 90 feet long, and had two-foot-thick walls. Additionally, the building featured a vestibule typical for temples of the time, a back chamber, and a special room dedicated to the deity. The kicker, according to a post from the Austrian Archaeological Institute Athens, is the presence of a marble perirrhanterion, or a water basin used for ritual washing in sanctuaries in the Archaic period.

“This discovery allows new perspectives on the political and economic importance of the [religious cooperation] of the Triphylian cities in the 6th century B.C.E, for whom the sanctuary of Poseidon at Samikon formed the centre of their religious and ethnic identity,” they write.

[Related: Tomb of a forgotten queen is one of several new stunning Egyptian discoveries.]

The region where this discovery was found is also known for its group of three large hills surrounded by lagoons and coastal swamps. “The results of our investigations to date indicate that the waves of the open Ionian Sea actually washed up directly against the group of hills until the 5th millennium B.C.E. Thereafter, on the side facing the sea, an extensive beach barrier system developed in which several lagoons were isolated from the sea,” Andreas Vött of Mainz University says in a release. 

These hills came in handy because the region was also plagued by tsunamis in the prehistoric and historic eras, some records showing events as recently as 551 and 1303 C.E. But, the builders of this temple might have seen that as an advantage for the particular location of Poseidon’s holy house. Afterall, he was known for his temper coming out in the forms of floods, earthquakes, and general destruction.

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Just days into 2023, Californians braced for the latest in a series of atmospheric river storms that National Weather Service forecasters called “impressive,” “debilitating” and “brutal.”

“To put it simply, this will likely be one of the most impactful systems on a widespread scale that this meteorologist has seen in a long while,” an unnamed Bay Area meteorologist wrote in the agency’s ongoing forecast discussion.

Much of Northern California is still recovering from a New Year’s Eve storm that dumped widespread, historic rain: One downtown San Francisco monitor recorded 5.46 inches in 24 hours, just shy of the wettest day in 170 years of record-keeping. Water inundated Bay Area homes and businesses, and flooding on the Cosumnes River southeast of Sacramento breached at least two levees, closing Highway 99 and leaving one person dead.

Another storm was forecast for Jan. 4 and 5, and meteorologists are watching several more that appear poised to follow. Coming in such rapid succession over an already-soaked landscape, their cumulative effect “could be quite debilitating,” forecasters wrote, though meteorologists believe it will still fall short of the epic “ARkStorm,” a megaflood scenario outlined by scientists that was widely publicized in 2022.

That these storms are so clustered is unusual, threatening historic damage to one of the West’s most populous regions. But severe storms of this type—called atmospheric rivers—are becoming more likely and intense as global temperatures rise. They’re also not universally terrible: Though they can do serious damage to human communities, some ecosystems rely on regular flushes of heavy precipitation. More and more, the West’s drinking water supply does, too.

What is an atmospheric river?

An atmospheric river is a narrow band of moisture that starts in the tropics and flows toward the western coasts of North America, South America and Europe like a river in the sky. “They can carry an amount of water roughly equivalent to the average flow (in cubic feet per second) at the mouth of the Mississippi,” said Matt Solum, a response and preparedness specialist at the National Weather Service’s Western Region. When the storms reach land, they release it all, often accompanied by tree-toppling winds. The strongest ones push inland, snarling the Intermountain West with snow.

Atmospheric rivers are responsible for most of the extreme flood events in the Western U.S., but they’re also critical to its water resources. NOAA estimates that just a few such storms each year provide up to half of the West’s precipitation, filling reservoirs and bolstering snowpack in a region that is otherwise increasingly parched.

What damage do atmospheric rivers cause?

When these storms hit, they unleash floodwaters, send rockslides down steep or fire-scarred terrain, slam the coast with extreme waves, and topple trees and powerlines, endangering lives. Infrastructure designed to protect residents from flooding may be threatened, too: Scientists have long warned that the nation’s aging dams weren’t built to withstand a new era of floods. In 2017, the spillway of California’s Oroville Dam cracked under the pressure of atmospheric river rainfall, forcing the evacuation of 180,000 people downstream. Reservoirs across Northern California neared historic lows in 2022, which gives them a large buffer to absorb runoff—but that could change if this month’s rainfall reaches the higher end of projections, UCLA climatologist Daniel Swain said on a recent YouTube stream on his Weather West channel.

Could this atmospheric river end the drought?

This month’s California storms should go a long way toward easing drought in the short term, Swain said. But they won’t do much in the longer term. As global temperatures rise, drought conditions in the West are driven more by increased evaporation than by lack of precipitation.

Is climate change making atmospheric rivers worse?

Warmer air carries more moisture, so climate change is making atmospheric rivers more potent, even as other water supplies across the Western U.S. dwindle. In 2022, researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography found that damages from atmospheric river-caused floods could triple by the end of the century if action is not taken to reduce global emissions. Currently, such damages average about $1 billion annually in the U.S.

Do atmospheric rivers help ecosystems?

Many species, including salmon, rely on periods of heavy rainfall, like those atmospheric rivers bring. The effects of atmospheric rivers on actual rivers are mixed: Heavy flows can scour and erode creek beds, threatening whatever is living—or spawning—in them. But in some places, high flows due to atmospheric rivers have actually helped salmon get upstream – including into one California creek where they’d never been recorded before.

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Parts of California have seen more than a foot of rain since Sunday, when the latest wave of moisture hit, thanks to an atmospheric river bringing storm after storm to the western United States. The disastrous weather spread from Northern California into the central and southern parts of the state. In sections of of Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties (west of Los Angeles), more than 16 inches of rain has fallen as of early this morning, prompting evacuations and flood alerts.

The storms are blamed for at least 14 deaths throughout the state. Floodwaters killed one person on Monday in San Luis Obispo County and a 5-year-old boy remains missing.

The National Weather Service (NWS) warned on Tuesday that heavy rain will continue to fall, causing more flash flooding, mudslides, and misery to the state. Forecasters expect Southern California to see at least seven more inches of rain over the next few days with “no significant let up” expected.

[Related: Strong storms and strange weather patterns sweep the US.]

As of early Tuesday morning, more than 11 million people in in western Los Angeles, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, and Ventura counties are under a flood warning, while about 34 million people across California are under flood watches.

On Monday, evacuation orders were issued for parts of Santa Barbara County due to worries about mudslides in areas where wildfires have made the ground less stable. “LEAVE NOW! This is a rapidly evolving situation,” Santa Barbara County officials said. “Be prepared to sustain yourself and your household for multiple days if you choose not to evacuate.”

These orders were issued five years to the day after a mudslide killed 23 people in Montecito. Montecito is an affluent town home to celebrities including Ellen DeGeneres and Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex. DeGeneres posted a video on Twitter of a raging creek near her home and urged neighbors in lower lying areas to flee.

“We’re in the midst of a series of significant and powerful storms,” Sheriff Bill Brown of Santa Barbara County said in a briefing on Monday. “Currently, we’re experiencing a storm that is causing many problems and has the potential to cause major problems across our county, especially in the burn scar areas.”

On Tuesday, shelter-in-place orders are in place for some areas of Santa Barbara County and all public schools are closed.

Further north towards the Bay Area and the Sacramento region, meteorologists are monitoring thunderstorms and advised residents to be alert. “When thunder roars, head indoors,” NWS meteorologists warned.

[Related: It’s not in your head: The weather is weirder, and climate change is the reason why.]

According to the NWS, the state is seeing between 400 and 600 percent above average rainfall levels and comes after a recent drought. The deluge has filled water reservoirs, which “are now above their historical average levels.” However, the drought and devastating wildfires means that the land less able to soak up as much water, making California extremely vulnerable to flooding.

High winds are also a concern for both inland and coastal areas. More than 37 million people were under wind alerts on Monday in California, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Utah, Arizona, and Wyoming, with Oroville, California recording a 132 MPH wind gust.

This current round of severe weather is part of a relentless parade of atmospheric rivers slamming the West Coast. Atmospheric rivers are dense areas of moisture from over the ocean that is brought to land an airborne current. They have the power to carry over one billion pounds of moisture overhead and this current stretch due to a steady west-to-east jetflow that is pushing these overhead rivers into California.

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As 2022 ends and 2023 begins, weather around the world is breaking records. In Buffalo, New York, a four day long “once in a generation” blizzard struck just before Christmas, dumping 51.9 inches of snow on the city and killing at least 37 people. In Europe, a heat wave shattered records in eight countries, as some residents rang in the new year wearing t-shirts and shorts.

Overnight on January 4, a powerful bomb cyclone hit the northern California coast with hurricane force winds and a forecasted two to four inches rain, possibly more than six in some spots. This region is still drying out from another storm last week.

It’s the latest in a series of storms brought in by an atmospheric river, or dense moisture from over the ocean that’s brought to land an airborne current. The Pineapple Express is a well-known example of a strong atmospheric river that can bring moisture from the tropics near Hawaii across the Pacific Ocean to the western coast of the continental United States.

[Related: What more rain in the Arctic means for people, ecosystems, and wildlife.]

California Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency and urged residents to stay informed and prepare for evacuations if needed. Director of the governor’s office of emergency services Nancy Ward warned of mudslides, flooding, and power outages. “We anticipate that this may be one of the most challenging and impactful series of storms to touch down in California in the last five years.”

The city of San Francisco is bracing for more damage today. “Floods are inevitable,” San Francisco Mayor London Breed warned ahead of the storm. “It’s coming down hard and it’s not letting up any time soon. We want people to stay indoors, we want them to stay home.” The city saw flooding over the weekend after a close to record-breaking 5.46 inches of rain was recorded downtown.

The city saw mudslides, sinkholes, and localized flooding just ahead of the storm, with some of the worst of it still to come, according to Mary Ellen Carol, executive director of San Francisco’s Department of Emergency Management.

The Central Valley and Foothills remain under a flood watch and a Winter Storm Warning is in effect with regions about 7,000 feet expecting two to four feet of snow.

[Related: How disastrous floods can also lead to food insecurity.]

Drivers are also urged to stay off the roads, as heavy winds are expected to topple trees and motorists risk getting stuck in floodwaters. “If you can, if at all possible, just postpone that trip, delay it,” said California Highway Patrol spokesperson Mike Salas. “Once that car gets into that water, you just never know what is going to happen. A lot of times, we have a mechanical breakdown.”

About 180,000 customers were without electricity in the state as of early Thursday morning.

This blast of extreme weather began from a giant hurricane-force low pressure system that churned over the eastern Pacific Ocean.

Earlier this week, central and southern parts of the United States saw damage from the same multi-hazard storm system that drenched California over the weekend. Here, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico met above-normal temperatures to from severe thunderstorms. On January 3, Mobile, Alabama hit 79 degrees Fahrenheit and Pensacola, Florida broke it’s daily high record at 81 degrees.

Six tornadoes hit central Illinois, the largest number of January twisters since 1989, according to the National Weather Service. The tornadoes were spawned by “mini supercell thunderstorms.” The tornadoes damaged some buildings in Decatur, including a former bowling alley.

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Rice farmers living in Sidoarjo Regency, Indonesia, awoke to a strange sight on May 29, 2006. The ground had ruptured overnight and was spewing out steam.

In the following weeks, water, boiling-hot mud and natural gas were added to the mixture. When the eruption intensified, mud started to spread over the fields. Alarmed residents evacuated, hoping to wait out the eruption safely.

Except that it didn’t stop. Weeks passed, and the spreading mud engulfed entire villages. In a frantic race against time, the Indonesian government began to build levees to contain the mud and stop the spread. When the mud overtopped these levees, they built new ones behind the first set. The government eventually succeeded in stopping the mud’s advance, but not before the flows had wiped out a dozen villages and forced 60,000 people to relocate.

Why would the Earth suddenly start vomiting forth huge quantities of mud like this?

Introducing mud volcanoes

The Lusi structure – a contraction of Lumpur Sidoarjo, meaning “Sidoarjo mud” – is an example of a geological feature known as a mud volcano. They form when a combination of mud, fluids and gases erupt at the Earth’s surface. The term “volcano” is borrowed from the much better known world of igneous volcanoes, where molten rock comes to the surface. I’ve been studying these fascinating structures on subsurface seismic data for the past five years, but nothing compares to seeing one actively erupting.

For mud volcanoes, in many cases the mud bubbles up to the surface rather quietly. But sometimes the eruptions are quite violent. Furthermore, most of the gas coming out of a mud volcano is methane, which is highly flammable. This gas can ignite, creating spectacular fiery eruptions.

Mud volcanoes are little known in North America, but much more common in other parts of the world, including not only Indonesia but also Azerbaijan, Trinidad, Italy and Japan.

They form when fluids and gases that have built up under pressure inside the Earth find an escape route to the surface via a network of fractures. The fluids move up these cracks, carrying mud with them, creating the mud volcano as they escape.

The idea is similar to a car tire containing compressed air. As long as the tire is intact, the air stays safely inside. Once the air has a pathway out, however, it begins to escape. Sometimes the air escapes as a slow leak – in other cases there is a blowout.

Overpressure within the Earth builds up when underground fluids are unable to escape from beneath the weight of overlying sediments. Some of this fluid was trapped within the sediment when it was deposited. Other fluids may migrate in from deeper sediments, while still others may be generated in place by chemical reactions in the sediments. One important type of chemical reaction generates oil and natural gas. Finally, fluids may become overpressured if they are squeezed by tectonic forces during mountain building.

Overpressures are commonly encountered during drilling for oil and gas and are typically planned for. A primary way of dealing with overpressures is to fill the wellbore with dense drilling mud, which has sufficient weight to contain the overpressures.

If the well is drilled with insufficient mud weight, any overpressured fluids can rush up the wellbore to explode out at the surface, leading to a spectacular blowout. Famous examples of blowouts include the 1901 Spindletop gusher in Texas and the more recent 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. In those cases it was oil, not mud, that burst out of the wells.

In addition to being fascinating in their own right, mud volcanoes are also useful to scientists as windows into conditions deep inside the Earth. Mud volcanoes can involve materials from as deep as 6 miles (10 kilometers) below the Earth’s surface, so their chemistry and temperature can provide useful insights into deep-Earth processes that can’t be obtained in any other way.

For example, analysis of the mud erupting from Lusi has revealed that the water was heated by an underground magma chamber associated with the nearby Arjuno-Welirang volcanic complex. Every mud volcano reveals details about what’s happening underground, allowing scientists to build a more comprehensive 3D view of what’s going on inside the planet.

Lusi’s mud is still erupting

Today, more than 16 years after the eruption began, the Lusi structure in Indonesia continues to erupt, but at a much slower rate. Its mud covers a total area of roughly 2.7 square miles (7 square km), more than 1,300 football fields, and is contained behind a series of levees that have been built up to a height of 100 feet (30 meters).

Almost as interesting as the efforts to stop the mud have been the legal battles aimed at assigning blame for the disaster. The initial rupture occurred about 650 feet (200 meters) from an actively drilling gas exploration well, leading to widely publicized accusations that the oil company responsible for the well was at fault. The operator of the well, Lapindo Brantas, countered that the eruption was natural, triggered by an earthquake that had occurred several days earlier.

Those who believe the gas well triggered the eruption argue that the well experienced a blowout due to insufficient mud weight, but that the blowout did not come all the way up the wellbore to the surface. Instead, the fluids came only partway up the wellbore before injecting sideways into fractures and erupting at the surface several hundred meters away. As evidence, these proponents point to measurements made in the well during drilling. Furthermore, they suggest the earthquake was too far away from the well to have had any effect.

By contrast, proponents of the earthquake trigger believe that the Lusi eruption was caused by an active hydrothermal system in the subsurface, somewhat akin to Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park. They argue that such systems have a long history of being affected by very distant earthquakes, so the argument that Lusi was too far away from the earthquake is invalid.

Furthermore, they suggest that a pressure test in the well conducted after the eruption started showed that the wellbore was intact, not breached by fractures and leaking fluid. Consistent with this interpretation, there is no evidence that any of the drilling mud ever came out of the Lusi eruptions.

In 2009, the Indonesian supreme court dismissed a lawsuit charging the company with negligence. The same year, police dropped criminal investigations against Lapindo Brantas and several of its employees, citing a lack of evidence. Although the lawsuits have been settled, the debate continues, with international research groups lining up on both sides of the dispute.

Michael R. Hudec is a Senior Research Scientist at Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas at Austin. He receives funding from the Applied Geodynamics Laboratory, an oil-industry funded research consortium supported by more than 20 companies.

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

Planet Earth used to be something like a cross between a deep freeze and a car crusher. During vast stretches of the planet’s history, everything from pole to pole was squashed beneath a blanket of ice a kilometer or more thick. Scientists call this snowball Earth.

Some early animals managed to endure this frigid era from roughly 720 to 580 million years ago, but they had their work cut out for them. Despite their valiant successes, the repeated expansion and contraction of giant ice sheets pulverized the hardy extremophiles’ remains leaving almost no trace of them in the fossil record and scientists with little to no idea of how they managed to survive.

“It’s basically like having a giant bulldozer,” says Huw Griffiths of the British Antarctic Survey. “The next glacial expansion would have just erased all that and turned it into mush, basically.”

Despite the lack of direct evidence thanks to all that glacial churning, Griffiths argues it is reasonable to propose that a diverse range of animal life inhabited snowball Earth. He suggests that this flourishing would have pre-dated the so-called Cambrian explosion, a period around 540 million years ago when a great and unprecedented diversity of animal life emerged on Earth. “It’s not a huge leap of imagination that there were much smaller, simpler things that existed before that,” Griffiths says.

The full picture of animal life during this time is lost, but Griffiths and his colleagues take a stab in a recent paper at trying to figure out what it might have looked like.

The team considered three different frozen periods. The first was the Sturtian snowball Earth, which began about 720 million years ago. It lasted for up to 60 million years. This is a mind-blowingly long time—it’s nearly as long as the period between the end of the dinosaur era and today. Then came the Marinoan snowball Earth, which started 650 million years ago and lasted a mere 15 million years. It was eventually followed by the Gaskiers glaciation around 580 million years ago. This third glaciation was shorter still and is often called a slushball rather than a snowball Earth because the ice coverage was likely not as extensive.

Though the ice smushed most of the fossils from these periods, scientists have found a handful of remnants. These rare fossils portray the weird animals that existed around the time of the Gaskiers glaciation. Among these ancient slushball-Earth dwellers were the frondomorphs—organisms that looked a bit like fern leaves. Frondomorphs lived fixed to the seafloor beneath the ice and possibly absorbed nutrients from the water as it flowed around them.

Short on direct evidence, Griffiths and his colleagues instead argue that the survival strategies of animals during the great freezes of the past are likely echoed by the life that dwells in the most similar environment on Earth today—Antarctica.

Some modern Antarctic inhabitants such as anemones live upside down affixed to the underside of the sea ice. One of the favorite feeding strategies of krill is grazing microorganisms on this upturned plane. Perhaps early animals foraged and found shelter in such locations, too, Griffiths and his colleagues suggest.

It’s also possible that the waxing and waning of sea ice introduced algae or other microorganisms living on the ice into seawater allowing them to bloom, which might have provided food for other early animals.

One of the challenges that inhabitants of a snowball Earth faced was the possible lack of oxygen, both because the oxygen levels in the air were low and because there was limited mixing from the atmosphere into the water. But oxygenated meltwater high in the water column might have supported animals that depended on it. Some denizens that live on the Antarctic seafloor today, such as certain species of feather star, solve this problem by relying on water currents to bring a steady flow of oxygen and nutrients from the small areas of open water at the surface to deep below the ice shelves. There’s no reason to think this didn’t happen during the Gaskiers slushball Earth period, too.

“We are really talking about very basic forms of life … but at the time that’s all you’d have needed to be king of the animals,” says Griffiths.

Alongside frondomorphs, the seafloor might also have been inhabited by sponges. Some fossil evidence of sponges dates back to well before the Sturtian snowball Earth, though there is some debate over this, says Griffiths.

Ashleigh Hood, a sedimentologist at the University of Melbourne in Australia who was not involved in the research, jokes that “everyone, including us, has their oldest sponge that they’ve found in the record and no one else believes them.”

Some modern sponges live symbiotically with bacteria, which may help them access nutrients when other food is scarce. “That’s probably based off a survival strategy they had really early on in their history,” Hood suggests.

Andrew Stewart, assistant curator at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa who also wasn’t involved in the paper, has studied countless species from harsh Antarctic environments. Many of these organisms cope in incredibly dark, cold, or chemically toxic places. For Stewart, Antarctic extremophiles are a reminder of how robust life on Earth really is—and perhaps always has been.

“It’s just the most amazing place,” he says. “You go, No, bollocks, nothing can survive there! Well, actually it can.”

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Close to 177 million people in the United States are shivering in or anticipating an arctic blast and a messy mix of rain, snow, and gusty winds. According to the National Weather Service, more than 200 million Americans were under winter weather advisories on Thursday night due to the icy and snowy conditions, with the snowiest part of the storm set to arrive for some on Friday.

“Life-threatening wind chills over the Great Plains (will) overspread the eastern half of the nation by Friday,” the Weather Prediction Center said.

[Related: Texas’s grid may still be unprepared for the next big winter storm.]

Wind chills below minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit have already been reported, with two locations in Wyoming setting records early Thursday for the, “lowest temperatures ever recorded at a particular location, regardless of the date on the calendar.” Casper, Wyoming saw minus 41 degrees Fahrenheit and Riverton, Wyoming saw minus 29. Meanwhile, Denver, Colorado saw a 47 degree drop in temperature in only two hours on Thursday, from 47 degrees Fahrenheit to minus one degree.

Even areas of the southern US won’t be spared from the extreme Arctic cold. According to Alabama’s state emergency management agency, the state will likely see, “the coldest December airmass to hit the state since 1989,” continuing on Friday. Alabama is expected to face low temperatures ranging from the single digits in the north to the low 20s near the Gulf of Mexico.

Close to 80,000 customers in Texas are currently without power, according to poweroutage.us, with tens of thousands of customers in Arkansas, Missouri, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee also without electricity.

The Midwest and Great Lakes began seeing widespread light to moderate snow with powerful winds causing blizzard like conditions on Thursday. “Heavy snowfall rates” of about 1 to 2 inches per hour, “along with wind gusts of over 50 mph will result in near-zero visibility and considerable blowing and drifting of snow,” the Weather Prediction Center said.

The strong bomb cyclone is set to intensify Friday. A bomb cyclone is a rapidly strengthening storm that drops a certain number of millibars (a unit that measures the air pressure in the atmosphere) in 24 hours. Generally, a storm must drop 24 millibars in one day to be considered a bomb cyclone, but that can change depending on the latitude of the storm. Ahead of the snowstorm on Tuesday, a forecaster with Buffalo, New York’s weather service warned that this rapid decrease in pressure could be a, “once in a generation type event,” since this kind of rapid storm strengthening is rare over the lower Great Lakes.

In parts of the Northeast, flooding was reported on Thursday ahead of a “flash freeze” which could cause icy roads, when temperatures are set to plummet by close to 30 degrees Fahrenheit on Friday.

[Related: 10 winter survival tips everyone should know.]

On Thursday morning, President Joe Biden received a briefing on the weather from the National Weather Service and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and he encouraged Americans to pay attention to weather warnings and to stay safe in the face of the extreme cold. “This is really a very serious weather alert here. And it goes from Oklahoma all the way to Wyoming, and Wyoming to Maine. And it’s of real consequence, Biden said. He added that the White House has reached out to the 26 governors in the states that are affected by the storm and extreme cold.

To stay safe during winter weather, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends being extremely careful when using extra heating devices such as space heaters and fireplaces, making sure windows and doors are closed tightly to keep cold air out, dressing warmly in dry layers of clothing, and covering as much skin as possible if trips outside are needed.

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At 2:34 a.m. PST, a 6.4-magnitude earthquake stuck Northern California, with at least two people injured and thousands without power. The quake was centered just off the coast in the Pacific Ocean, roughly 7.5 miles from Ferndale, California, in sparsely populated Humboldt County. Ferndale is about 20 miles southwest of Eureka and 280 miles northwest of the state capital of Sacramento.

Residents have been warned to prepare for aftershocks, but there is no tsunami threat, according to NOAA. More than three dozen aftershocks had been measured by the United States Geological Survey.

[Related: Earthquake models get a big shakeup with clues buried in the San Andreas fault.]

The California Governor’s office of Emergency Services (Cal OES) is continuing to assess the damage. “Cal OES is coordinating with local and tribal governments to assess the impacts of the Earthquake and supporting with resources, mutual aid and damage assessment. State Agency response including Cal OES, Cal Fire, Cal Trans, Cal CGS, CHP in support of local efforts,” the agency said in an update on Twitter.

One of the roads damaged was near the Fernbridge, a bridge that crosses the Eel River. This bridge and road are a primary route for Ferndale residents to reach Eureka, Humboldt County’s largest city. The bridge was closed early Tuesday morning.

Shane Wilson, chief of the Rio Dell Volunteer Fire Department, told The New York Times on Tuesday morning that that two structure fires were reported, both causing minor damage. However, there was also “significant structure damage,” from the quake including houses separated from foundations, according to Wilson.

[Related: Earthquakes can cause serious psychological aftershocks.]

Ferndale is no stranger to earthquakes in recent years. In December 2021, a 6.2-magnitude tremor rocked the town, but proved that the state’s early warning system was working. Some residents received notice about 10 to 15 seconds before shaking began.

According to the the American Red Cross, Department of Homeland Security, and Earthquake Country Alliance, there are some things to do to stay safe after an earthquake has struck:

• Get outside if you are in a damaged building and move far away from an debris that may fall.
• Close your mouth of you are stuck under debris to keep from inhaling fumes. Try to send a text for help or hit a nearby object and whistle so rescuers can find you.
• Wait out the aftershocks and be prepared for them in the hours after the initial quake.
• Keep an eye on updates from government agencies and news sources.
• Only make phone calls unless it’s an emergency, since call volume can exceed capacity after an earthquake. Text instead.

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In the Arctic, the freedom to travel, hunt and make day-to-day decisions is profoundly tied to cold and frozen conditions for much of the year. These conditions are rapidly changing as the Arctic warms.

The Arctic is now seeing more rainfall when historically it would be snowing. Sea ice that once protected coastlines from erosion during fall storms is forming later. And thinner river and lake ice is making travel by snowmobile increasingly life-threatening.

Ship traffic in the Arctic is also increasing, bringing new risks to fragile ecosystems, and the Greenland ice sheet is continuing to send freshwater and ice into the ocean, raising global sea level

In the annual Arctic Report Card, released Dec. 13, 2022, we brought together 144 other Arctic scientists from 11 countries to examine the current state of the Arctic system.

The Arctic is getting wetter and rainier

We found that Arctic precipitation is on the rise across all seasons, and these seasons are shifting.

Much of this new precipitation is now falling as rain, sometimes during winter and traditionally frozen times of the year. This disrupts daily life for humans, wildlife and plants.

Roads become dangerously icy more often, and communities face greater risk of river flooding events. For Indigenous reindeer herding communities, winter rain can create an impenetrable ice layer that prevents their reindeer from accessing vegetation beneath the snow.

Arctic-wide, this shift toward wetter conditions can disrupt the lives of animals and plants that have evolved for dry and cold conditions, potentially altering Arctic peoples’ local foods.

When Fairbanks, Alaska, got 1.4 inches of freezing rain in December 2021, the moisture created an ice layer that persisted for months, bringing down trees and disrupting travel, infrastructure and the ability of some Arctic animals to forage for food. The resulting ice layer was largely responsible for the deaths of a third of a bison herd in interior Alaska.

There are multiple reasons for this increase in Arctic precipitation.

As sea ice rapidly declines, more open water is exposed, which feeds increased moisture into the atmosphere. The entire Arctic region has seen a more than 40% loss in summer sea ice extent over the 44-year satellite record.

The Arctic atmosphere is also warming more than twice as fast as the rest of the globe, and this warmer air can hold more moisture.

Under the ground, the wetter, rainier Arctic is accelerating the thaw of permafrost, upon which most Arctic communities and infrastructure are built. The result is crumbling buildings, sagging and cracked roads, the emergence of sinkholes and the collapse of community coastlines along rivers and ocean.

Wetter weather also disrupts the building of a reliable winter snowpack and safe, reliable river ice, and often challenges Indigenous communities’ efforts to harvest and secure their food.

When Typhoon Merbok hit in September 2022, fueled by unusually warm Pacific water, its hurricane-force winds, 50-foot waves and far-reaching storm surge damaged homes and infrastructure over 1,000 miles of Bering Sea coastline, and disrupted hunting and harvesting at a crucial time.

Arctic snow season is shrinking

Snow plays critical roles in the Arctic, and the snow season is shrinking.

Snow helps to keep the Arctic cool by reflecting incoming solar radiation back to space, rather than allowing it to be absorbed by the darker snow-free ground. Its presence helps lake ice last longer into spring and helps the land to retain moisture longer into summer, preventing overly dry conditions that are ripe for devastating wildfires.

Snow is also a travel platform for hunters and a habitat for many animals that rely on it for nesting and protection from predators.

A shrinking snow season is disrupting these critical functions. For example, the June snow cover extent across the Arctic is declining at a rate of nearly 20% per decade, marking a dramatic shift in how the snow season is defined and experienced across the North.

Even in the depth of winter, warmer temperatures are breaking through. The far northern Alaska town of Utqiaġvik hit 40 degrees Fahrenheit (4.4 C) – 8 F above freezing – on Dec. 5, 2022, even though the sun does not breach the horizon from mid-November through mid-January.

Fatal falls through thin sea, lake and river ice are on the rise across Alaska, resulting in immediate tragedies as well as adding to the cumulative human cost of climate change that Arctic Indigenous peoples are now experiencing on a generational scale.

Greenland ice melt means global problems

The impacts of Arctic warming are not limited to the Arctic. In 2022, the Greenland ice sheet lost ice for the 25th consecutive year. This adds to rising seas, which escalates the danger coastal communities around the world must plan for to mitigate flooding and storm surge.

In early September 2022, the Greenland ice sheet experienced an unprecedented late-season melt event across 36% of the ice sheet surface. This was followed by another, even later melt event that same month, caused by the remnants of Hurricane Fiona moving up along eastern North America.

International teams of scientists are dedicated to assessing the scale to which the Greenland ice sheet’s ice formation and ice loss are out of balance. They are also increasingly learning about the transformative role that warming ocean waters play.

This year’s Arctic Report Card includes findings from the NASA Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) mission that has confirmed that warming ocean temperatures are increasing ice loss at the edges of the ice sheet.

Human-caused change is reshaping the Arctic

We are living in a new geological age — the Anthropocene — in which human activity is the dominant influence on our climate and environments.

In the warming Arctic, this requires decision-makers to better anticipate the interplay between a changing climate and human activity. For example, satellite-based ship data since 2009 clearly show that maritime ship traffic has increased within all Arctic high seas and national exclusive economic zones as the region has warmed.

For these ecologically sensitive waters, this added ship traffic raises urgent concerns ranging from the future of Arctic trade routes to the introduction of even more human-caused stresses on Arctic peoples, ecosystems and the climate. These concerns are especially pronounced given uncertainties regarding the current geopolitical tensions between Russia and the other Arctic states over its war in Ukraine.

Rapid Arctic warming requires new forms of partnership and information sharing, including between scientists and Indigenous knowledge-holders. Cooperation and building resilience can help to reduce some risks, but global action to rein in greenhouse gas pollution is essential for the entire planet.

Matthew L. Druckenmiller is a Research Scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), University of Colorado Boulder. Rick Thoman is an Alaska Climate Specialist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Twila Moon is a Deputy Lead Scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), University of Colorado Boulder.

Disclosure statement: Matthew Druckenmiller receives research funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Rick Thoman receives funding from NOAA/Arctic Program. Twila Moon receives research funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

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A destructive storm bringing blinding snow to the Great Plains and tornadoes to parts of the south is continuing to march across the United States on Wednesday. The threat of severe weather continues today for for Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and the Florida Panhandle, according to the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma.

More than 18 million people across the south were under the threat of severe storms yesterday, including tornadoes. The National Weather Service in Forth Worth, Texas confirmed five tornadoes across northern Texas as of yesterday afternoon. The destructive line of thunderstorms damaged dozens of businesses and homes and injured several people in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Tarrant County saw three tornadoes with the strongest rating EF-1. There was also an EF-2 tornado packing winds of 125 miles per hour in Wise County.

[Related: ‘Tornado alley’ looks far different than it did a century ago.]

Based on damage reports and radar, the NWS said Texas could have seen as many as a dozen tornadoes yesterday, but it has not yet confirmed that number.

In Wayne, Oklahoma, a confirmed EF2 tornado was on the ground for at least 3 miles with 120-125 mph winds, knocking out power and damaged homes, according to the NWS.

The storms pushed south and east and in Caddo Parish, Lousiana, authorities continue search and rescue operations after a strong storm Tuesday afternoon. According to the Caddo Parish Sheriff’s Office, the storms sent one woman to the hospital and two people are confirmed dead. A young boy was found dead in the Pecan Farms area of Keithville, Louisiana, where his home was destroyed by the tornado. The boy’s mother’s body was found nearby under debris, the sheriff’s office confirmed early this morning. The storm hit about 10 miles from Shreveport.

While December tornadoes are more rare, no month of the year is immune to the threats of severe weather in the United States. In December 2021, a violent EF-4 tornado began in northwest Tennessee and moved across western Kentucky. Its 165.7 mile long path length was on the longest tornado track in US history. During the same outbreak, a long-track EF-3 tornado with estimated peak winds of 160 mph also traveled through parts of Tennessee and Kentucky. Those storms killed 57 people and injured over 500.

[Related: NASA’s storm-chasing planes fly through blizzards to improve snowfall forecasts.]

The same storm system is bringing blizzard warnings from Montana into western Nebraska and Colorado. The NWS said as much as 2 feet is possible in some areas of western South Dakota and northwestern Nebraska, and winds of 50 mph could make it impossible to see outdoors in parts of Nebraska.

The storm is expected to move into the upper Midwest with ice, rain, and snow before heading into the central Appalachians and Northeast on Thursday.

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Over the weekend, officials in Hawaii lowered the alert level for the current eruption of the Mauna Loa volcano from a warning to a watch.

“We have good news to report,” said Ken Hon, the scientist in charge of the US Geological Survey (USGS) at the Hawaii Volcano Observatory, during a briefing, according to the Associated Press. “The eruption is still at an extremely low level at this point.”

Hon added that the eruption is currently contained within the volcano’s cinder cone. The USGS also said that a small amount of light can still be seen at night through a vent within the cone, but the channels below that vent, “appear drained of lava.” As the lava settles, the inactive front of the lava flow may move northward.

[Related: Geologists: We’re not ready for volcanoes.]

The USGS’ Hawaiian Volcano Observatory said that while the eruption on the mountain’s northeast rift zone is continuing, the lava output and volcanic gas emissions were “greatly reduced.”

“High eruption rates will not resume based on past eruptive behavior and current behavior suggests that the eruption may end soon,” the observatory said. “However, an inflationary trend of Mauna Loa’s summit is accompanying the decreased activity and there is a small possibility that the eruption could continue at very low eruptive rates.”

The nearby Kilauea volcano has also reached a “full pause” with its lava lake not moving and crusted over, according to Hon.

Mauna Loa is the world’s largest active volcano, and it began to erupt on November 28th. The eruption followed weeks of warnings from officials that an event like this was possible and the closure of the summit of the volcano and the trail leading to it earlier in November. The USGS said that this “heightened unrest” began in mid-September, when earthquakes beneath the summit jumped from about 10 to 20 per day to 40 to 50 quakes per day.

[Related: Tonga survived the largest volcanic plume in the planet’s history this year.]

The state’s National Guard was activated on December 5, to help with traffic control and other tasks as the lava inched towards a highway, according to the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency. The eruption began to show some signs of slowing on December 8.

Mauna Loa has erupted 33 times since 1893, making it the world’s most active volcano, according to the USGS. The most recent 1984 eruption ended what was then the longest quiet period in the volcano’s recorded history, a period of about nine years. Within hours of it’s first eruption on March 25, 1984, the mountain “expanded both mauka (toward the mountain) and makai (toward the ocean), creating a curtain of fire, a solid line of lava fountains over a mile long,” according to the National Park Service.

Another eruption occurred in 1950, when Mauna Loa’s lava traveled 15 miles to the ocean in less than three hours and lasted 23 days.

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Jim Elser scanned the snowfields clinging to the lower slopes of Clements Mountain in Montana’s Glacier National Park. While nearby tourists snapped pictures of soaring rock faces and searched for wildlife, Elser, an ecologist at the University of Montana and the director of the Flathead Lake Biological Station, concentrated on just one thing: finding snow algae. 

Elser and his research team tramped past flourishing purple asters and yellow arnica wildflowers, gaining elevation until they crested a ridge above a small basin. Marmot chirps replaced the sound of idling car engines at the Logan Pass parking lot, which swarmed with August visitors. A soft hum came from the bulky rectangular device strapped to the back of his colleague, Joe Giersch, an aquatic entomologist at the University of Montana; the device, a light-measuring tool, was warming up in preparation for the scientists’ data collection. 

Then, from roughly 100 yards away, the three scientists noticed a faint blush on the slushy snow ahead. They beelined toward it.  

Rouge-colored ribbons of algae ran 400 square feet across the sunny slope — Chlamydomonas nivalis, a red-pigmented green algae found in high alpine and polar regions around the globe. The algae’s striking appearance on snow has earned it nicknames ranging from the delicious-sounding — watermelon snow — to the ominous — glacier blood. Scientists believe this algae could play a major role in melting glaciers and snowfields. 

Sparkling fresh white snow is the most naturally reflective surface on Earth. When algal blooms take hold, they darken the snow, which then absorbs more heat and melts more quickly. This can create a feedback loop: As temperatures rise and more snow melts, the snow algae — which needs nutrients, light and liquid water — flourishes and expands. The algal bloom alters its own habitat, and appears to alter the surrounding habitat in the process. Just over half of the total runoff in the West comes from snowmelt, but the extent to which snow algae contributes to melting isn’t currently included in standard snowmelt models. These scientists hope that their work can help us better understand the role it plays as the climate changes. 

This summer, researchers from around the country crisscrossed the mountains of Washington, Oregon, Wyoming, Utah and Montana, looking for stained snow. They collected samples and tested the reflectiveness of snow algae patches. Sometimes, they stumbled across a site too late and found only pools of blood-red water, where patches of snow and algae had already melted. Finding intact snow to sample became a race against the summer’s heat, and the algae’s growth. “It’s an ephemeral bloom on an ephemeral substrate,” Elser said. “The seasonal snow is going, and whether or not those patches have snow algae on them is also unpredictable.”   

THE LATE SUMMER SUN beat down on our necks as we examined a patch of snow algae. A third member of Elser’s field team, Pablo Almela Gomez, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Minnesota, held a long wooden pole. At the end of the pole, the spectroradiometer, a small black tube, dangled over a plot of snow. “This is the nicest algae patch we’ve seen in a while,” Giersch remarked. Only a few pine needles and small pebbles freckled the red splotches. 

The scientists used the device to record the snow’s albedo, a measure of what fraction of the sunlight beaming down is reflected back up. Red snow means lower albedo, which means more absorbed sunlight and faster snowmelt. Other factors also influence albedo, including dirt, dust and ash from wildfires. Sand from the Gobi Desert can blow all the way to the Pacific Northwest, while dust from the shrinking Great Salt Lake sometimes coats the Wasatch Mountains. The team also measured the pigment concentration of the snow with a second spectroradiometer to figure out how much of the red color spectrum, most likely from the snow algae, was present.

A bighorn sheep supervised from a jagged cliff high above us as the team worked through the rest of their routine: measuring the water content of the snow, collecting bags of snow samples, and taking a snow core that revealed two layers of algal blooms, including a distinct rusty band a few inches below the surface.

Later that day, in a lab at the University of Montana’s Flathead Lake Biological Station, Elser and Almela Gomez would use the samples to test which inputs help snow algae grow. They’ll melt the snow, mix it together, and add nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus. Then, after five to 10 days under grow lights in a cold incubator, they’ll measure the chlorophyll levels to see how much the algae grew. 

The two types of nutrients come from different places. Previous work suggests that the phosphorus is found in rocks ground up by glacial movement, while nitrogen is blown in from the chemical fertilizers and manure in agricultural areas. The researchers suspect that both types of nutrients encourage algae growth, but they’re particularly interested in nitrogen. They believe algal blooms might be especially common in the Intermountain Rockies due to wind patterns, and they’re hoping to learn more about the dynamics involved. 

The team’s work is part of the small but growing field of snow algae research. The scientists hope to figure out what allows snow algae to thrive, and where it’s most likely to live. The Living Snow Project, a citizen science initiative created by Western Washington University researchers, asked skiers, climbers and hikers to help collect pink snow samples. Scientists have also converged on surging algal blooms in the French Alps. 

Learning what influences snow algae growth is an important step in understanding a changing water supply. More algae potentially means more melt, and knowing where algae might quicken snowmelt is especially crucial for the drought-prone Western U.S. Gradual snowmelt is good; it creates a more predictable water supply downstream for reservoirs, and infuses streams with the cold water that fisheries and other aquatic life rely on throughout hot summer months. Rapid snowmelt, however, brings a host of other problems. 

Elser compared the snow’s role to ice in a cocktail. “The ice is melting, but your drink is still nice and cold until that last piece of ice goes away,” he said. “Then it’s like, ‘What happened? My drink is warm.’” If snow algae hastens snowmelt or melts all the snow quickly, streams may end up warmer than usual and have less water as the summer advances. “It’s a pretty big deal,” said Scott Hotaling, a member of the snow algae research team and an assistant professor at Utah State University who studies changing mountain ecosystems. “We talk about the whole West being in a drought, and if there’s going to be another factor that perpetuates earlier melt, that’s important.” 

WATER MANAGERS and snowpack surveyors agree that faster melt is an issue, but they don’t necessarily agree on the role snow algae plays. Previous studies suggest that it could be significant: A 2021 article in the journal Nature Communications found that algal blooms were responsible for up to 13% of the surface melting that occurs on Greenland’s ice sheet, while a study in Alaska suggests that snow algae accounts for 17% of the total melting on one large icefield, a 21% increase. “A lot of studies have been done on these big ice sheets, where you have flat surfaces,” said project member Trinity Hamilton, a geomicrobiologist at the University of Minnesota. But mountains, of course, aren’t flat. And researchers don’t yet understand how variations in topography and slope could shape where snow algae grows.  The future findings of Hamilton and her team could locate these missing pieces of the puzzle.

“Really knowing how much water is coming from the snowpack and the timing of that is going to be critical for anybody who needs to know about water supply, whether it’s ag producers or for flood control,” said Erin Whorton, a water supply specialist with the Natural Resource Conservation Service’s Idaho Snow Survey. “Snowpack is incredibly important to the way we operate in the West.” 

Once snow algae’s effects are better understood, Whorton believes they should be included in models that predict the timing of snowmelt. But not everyone agrees. Is snow algae’s liminal existence in the high alpine a major threat, a pesky annoyance, or something in between? “There are so many variables in snowmelt that one really just needs to stick to the basics of climate variabilities,” said Scott Pattee, a water supply specialist with the NRCS Washington Snow Survey. “It’s really no more concerning than dirty or trashy snow, which can (also) accelerate the melt.” 

After the day of fieldwork in Glacier, the men packed up their gear and started slipping and sliding their way back down the snowfield. The Garden Wall rockface unfolded like a postcard in the distance. The snow we had just walked on now ran in rivulets, emptying onto the rocks below. We picked our way through muddy patches of trail and descended past a small waterfall, driven by an underground spring and snow melt. Some portion of the melt, however small, was caused by the living pink bloom we’d visited earlier that day. Time will tell if it will further dry out the already parched West. “The algae are just trying to survive,” Almela Gomez said. “They’re not guilty of anything.”  

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If you look back at the history of Atlantic hurricanes since the late 1800s, it might seem hurricane frequency is on the rise.

The year 2020 had the most tropical cyclones in the Atlantic, with 31, and 2021 had the third-highest, after 2005. The past decade saw five of the six most destructive Atlantic hurricanes in modern history.

Then a year like 2022 comes along, with no major hurricane landfalls until Fiona and Ian struck in late September. The Atlantic hurricane season, which ends Nov. 30, has had eight hurricanes and 14 named storms. It’s a reminder that small sample sizes can be misleading when assessing trends in hurricane behavior. There is so much natural variability in hurricane behavior year to year and even decade to decade that we need to look much further back in time for the real trends to come clear.

Fortunately, hurricanes leave behind telltale evidence that goes back millennia.

Two thousand years of this evidence indicates that the Atlantic has experienced even stormier periods in the past than we’ve seen in recent years. That’s not good news. It tells coastal oceanographers like me that we may be significantly underestimating the threat hurricanes pose to Caribbean islands and the North American coast in the future.

The natural records hurricanes leave behind

When a hurricane nears land, its winds whip up powerful waves and currents that can sweep coarse sands and gravel into marshes and deep coastal ponds, sinkholes and lagoons.

Under normal conditions, fine sand and organic matter like leaves and seeds fall into these areas and settle to the bottom. So when coarse sand and gravel wash in, a distinct layer is left behind.

Imagine cutting through a layer cake – you can see each layer of frosting. Scientists can see the same effect by plunging a long tube into the bottom of these coastal marshes and ponds and pulling up several meters of sediment in what’s known as a sediment core. By studying the layers in sediment, we can see when coarse sand appeared, suggesting an extreme coastal flood from a hurricane.

With these sediment cores, we have been able to document evidence of Atlantic hurricane activity over thousands of years.

We now have dozens of chronologies of hurricane activity at different locations – including New England, the Florida Gulf Coast, the Florida Keys and Belize – that reveal decade- to century-scale patterns in hurricane frequency.

Others, including from Atlantic Canada, North Carolina, northwestern Florida, Mississippi and Puerto Rico, are lower-resolution, meaning it is nearly impossible to discern individual hurricane layers deposited within decades of one another. But they can be highly informative for determining the timing of the most intense hurricanes, which can have significant impacts on coastal ecosystems.

It’s the records from the Bahamas, however, with nearly annual resolution, that are crucial for seeing the long-term picture for the Atlantic Basin.

Why The Bahamas are so important

The Bahamas are exceptionally vulnerable to the impacts of major hurricanes because of their geographic location.

In the North Atlantic, 85% of all major hurricanes form in what is known as the Main Development Region, off western Africa. Looking just at observed hurricane tracks from the past 170 years, my analysis shows that about 86% of major hurricanes that affect the Bahamas also form in that region, suggesting the frequency variability in the Bahamas may be representative of the basin.

A substantial percentage of North Atlantic storms also pass over or near these islands, so these records appear to reflect changes in overall North Atlantic hurricane frequency through time.

By coupling coastal sediment records from the Bahamas with records from sites farther north, we can explore how changes in ocean surface temperatures, ocean currents, global-scale wind patterns and atmospheric pressure gradients affect regional hurricane frequency.

As sea surface temperatures rise, warmer water provides more energy that can fuel more powerful and destructive hurricanes. However, the frequency of hurricanes – how often they form – isn’t necessarily affected in the same way.

The secrets hidden in blue holes

Some of the best locations for studying past hurricane activity are large, near-shore sinkholes known as blue holes.

Blue holes get their name from their deep blue color. They formed when carbonate rock dissolved to form underwater caves. Eventually, the ceilings collapsed, leaving behind sinkholes. The Bahamas has thousands of blue holes, some as wide as a third of a mile and as deep as a 60-story building.

They tend to have deep vertical walls that can trap sediments – including sand transported by strong hurricanes. Fortuitously, deep blue holes often have little oxygen at the bottom, which slows decay, helping to preserve organic matter in the sediment through time.

Cracking open a sediment core

When we bring up a sediment core, the coarse sand layers are often evident to the naked eye. But closer examination can tell us much more about these hurricanes of the past.

I use X-rays to measure changes in the density of sediment, X-ray fluorescence to examine elemental changes that can reveal if sediment came from land or sea, and sediment textural analysis that examines the grain size.

To figure out the age of each layer, we typically use radiocarbon dating. By measuring the amount of carbon-14, a radioactive isotope, in shells or other organic material found at various points in the core, I can create a statistical model that predicts the age of sediments throughout the core.

So far, my colleagues and I have published five paleohurricane records with nearly annual detail from blue holes on islands across the Bahamas.

Each record shows periods of significant increase in storm frequency lasting decades and sometimes centuries.

The records vary, showing that a single location might not reflect broader regional trends.

For example, Thatchpoint Blue Hole on Great Abaco Island in the northern Bahamas includes evidence of at least 13 hurricanes per century that were Category 2 or above between the years 1500 and 1670. That significantly exceeds the rate of nine per century documented since 1850. During the same period, 1500 to 1670, blue holes at Andros Island, just 186 miles (300 kilometers) south of Abaco, documented the lowest levels of local hurricane activity observed in this region during the past 1,500 years.

Spotting patterns across the Atlantic Basin

Together, however, these records offer a glimpse of broad regional patterns. They’re also giving us new insight into the ways ocean and atmospheric changes can influence hurricane frequency.

While rising sea surface temperatures provide more energy that can fuel more powerful and destructive hurricanes, their frequency – how often they form – isn’t necessarily affected in the same way. Some studies have predicted the total number of hurricanes will actually decrease in the future.

The compiled Bahamian records document substantially higher hurricane frequency in the northern Caribbean during the Little Ice Age, around 1300 to 1850, than in the past 100 years.

That was a time when North Atlantic surface ocean temperatures were generally cooler than they are today. But it also coincided with an intensified West African monsoon. The monsoon could have produced more thunderstorms off the western coast of Africa, which act as low-pressure seeds for hurricanes.

Steering winds and vertical wind shear likely also affect a region’s hurricane frequency over time. The Little Ice Age active interval observed in most Bahamian records coincides with increased hurricane strikes along the U.S. Eastern Seaboard from 1500 to 1670, but at the same time it was a quieter period in the Gulf of Mexico, central Bahamas and southern Caribbean.

Records from sites farther north tell us more about the climate. That’s because changes in ocean temperature and climate conditions are likely far more important to controlling regional impacts in such areas as the Northeastern U.S. and Atlantic Canada, where cooler climate conditions are often unfavorable for storms.

A warning for the islands

I am currently developing records of coastal storminess in locations including Newfoundland and Mexico. With those records, we can better anticipate the impacts of future climate change on storm activity and coastal flooding.

In the Bahamas, meanwhile, sea level rise is putting the islands at increasing risk, so even weaker hurricanes can produce damaging flooding. Given that storms are expected to be more intense, any increase in storm frequency could have devastating impacts.

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On the Big Island of Hawaii, the world’s largest active volcano is currently erupting, spewing debris and ash from its summit. This is the first time in almost 40 years that Mauna Loa has erupted.

The National Weather Service issued an ashfall advisory for portions of the Big Island, with up to a quarter-inch of ash accumulations possible in some areas. The advisory has since been cancelled. Several lava flows were reported in Mauna Loa’s Northeast Rift Zone, but no downslope communities are currently at risk from the lava. However, officials still told people living on the Big Island to be prepared for a worst-case scenario.

A timelapse video released by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) shows the ash plume and lava spewing up during the eruption and NOAA satellites captured the caldera’s heat signature from space.

[Related: Geologists: We’re not ready for volcanoes.]

According to Ken Hon, the scientist-in-charge at the Hawaiian Volcanos Observatory, the eruption began late on Sunday night in the summit caldera of the volcano after a series of closely spaced earthquakes. Piping hot magma moved to the surface, but lava flows were contained to the surface of the mountain’s summit crater and within the Northeast Rift Zone.

The USGS increased the volcanic alert level from a yellow advisory to a red warning and urged residents at risk to review preparedness guidelines. The agency also said that the early stages of a Mauna Loa eruption can be very dynamic and the location and advance of lava flows can change rapidly, based on data from previous eruptions.

“If the eruption remains in Moku‘āweoweo, lava flows will most likely be confined within the caldera walls,” the USGA wrote in a press release.  “However, if the eruptive vents migrate outside its walls, lava flows may move rapidly downslope.”

The eruption began at 11:30 p.m. local time Sunday (4:30 a.m. EST Monday). While there is no indication of lava moving further down, Hawaii County Civil Defense opened shelters in Kailua-Kona and Pahala due to people self-evacuating along the South Kona coast and as a precaution.

The Big Island is the southernmost island in the Hawaiian archipelago, and Mauna Loa is one of five volcanoes together make up the Big Island. Mauna Loa stands at 13,679 feet above sea level.

[Related: Tonga survived the largest volcanic plume in the planet’s history this year.]

It is the neighbor of the Kilauea volcano, which erupted in a residential neighborhood in 2018. The eruption destroyed 700 homes. Since some of Mauna Loa’s slopes are steeper than Kilauea’s, the lava can flow much faster when it erupts, which is one of the causes for concern in this eruption.

Mauna Loa has erupted 33 times since 1893, making it the world’s most active volcano, according to the USGS. The most recent 1984 eruption ended what was then the longest quiet period in the volcano’s recorded history, a period of about nine years. Within hours of it’s first eruption on March 25, 1984, the mountain “expanded both mauka (toward the mountain) and makai (toward the ocean), creating a curtain of fire, a solid line of lava fountains over a mile long,” according to the National Park Service.

Another eruption occurred in 1950, when Mauna Loa’s lava traveled 15 miles to the ocean in less than three hours and lasted 23 days.

This week’s recent eruption followed weeks of warnings from officials that an event like this was possible and the some closures within Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park earlier this month. The USGS said that this “heightened unrest” began in mid-September, when earthquakes beneath the summit jumped from about 10 to 20 per day to 40 to 50 quakes per day.

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It’s hard for most people to imagine 6 feet of snow in one storm, like the Buffalo area saw over the weekend, but such extreme snowfall events occasionally happen along the eastern edges of the Great Lakes.

The phenomenon is called “lake-effect snow,” and the lakes play a crucial role.

It starts with cold, dry air from Canada. As the bitter cold air sweeps across the relatively warmer Great Lakes, it sucks up more and more moisture that falls as snow.

I’m a climate scientist at UMass Amherst. In the Climate Dynamics course I teach, students often ask how cold, dry air can lead to heavy snowfall. Here’s how that happens.

How dry air turns into snowstorms

Lake-effect snow is strongly influenced by the differences between the amount of heat and moisture at the lake surface and in the air a few thousand feet above it.

A big contrast creates conditions that help to suck water up from the lake, and thus more snowfall. A difference of 25 degrees Fahrenheit (14 Celsius) or more creates an environment that can fuel heavy snows. This often happens in late fall, when lake water is still warm from summer and cold air starts sweeping down from Canada. More moderate lake-effect snows occur every fall under less extreme thermal contrasts.

The wind’s path over the lakes is important. The farther cold air travels over the lake surface, the more moisture is evaporated from the lake. A long “fetch” – the distance over water – often results in more lake-effect snow than a shorter one.

Imagine a wind out of the west that is perfectly aligned so it blows over the entire 241-mile length of Lake Erie. That’s close to what Buffalo was experiencing during the storm that started Nov. 17, 2022.

Once the snow reaches land, elevation contributes an additional effect. Land that slopes up from the lake increases lift in the atmosphere, enhancing snowfall rates. This mechanism is termed “orographic effect.” The Tug Hill plateau, located between Lake Ontario and the Adirondacks in western New York, is well known for its impressive snowfall totals.

In a typical year, annual snowfall in the “lee,” or downwind, of the Great Lakes approaches 200 inches in some places.

Residents in places like Buffalo are keenly aware of the phenomenon. In 2014, some parts of the region received upwards of 6 feet of snowfall during an epic lake-effect event Nov. 17-19. The weight of the snow collapsed hundreds of roofs and led to over a dozen deaths.

Lake-effect snowfall in the Buffalo area is typically confined to a narrow region where the wind is coming straight off the lake. Drivers on Interstate 90 often go from sunny skies to a blizzard and back to sunny skies over a distance of 30 to 40 miles.

The role of climate change

Is climate change playing a role in the lake-effect snow machine? To an extent.

Fall has warmed across the upper Midwest. Ice prevents lake water from evaporating into the air, and it is forming later than in the past. Warmer summer air has led to warmer lake temperature into fall.

Models predict that with additional warming, more lake-effect snow will occur. But over time, the warming will lead to more of the precipitation falling as lake-effect rain, which already occurs in early fall, rather than snow.

Disclosure: Michael A. Rawlins receives funding from the Department of Energy, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the National Science Foundation.

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On Monday, an earthquake hit Cianjur in Indonesia’s West Java province at about 1:21 p.m. local time. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) reports that it was at a depth of 6.2 miles, which caused multiple buildings to collapse when many children were at school.

Rescue crews in Indonesia continue to search for the missing and wounded following the event. More than 140 aftershocks have struck following the 5.6-magnitude earthquake struck the country’s highly populated West Java province. Twenty-five aftershocks were reported within the first two hours of the quake alone.

According to the country’s National Agency for Disaster Management (BNPB), at least 268 people are dead, 151 people remain missing, and more than 1,000 are injured. The earthquake destroyed more than 22,000 homes and over 58,000 people have been displaced, BNPB Major General Suharyanto said on Tuesday.

[Related: Earthquake models get a big shakeup with clues buried in the San Andreas fault.]

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin offered his “deepest condolences” while speaking at the ASEAN multilateral meeting in Cambodia yesterday.

“The majority of those who died were children,” West Java’s governor, Ridwan Kamil, told reporters Monday, while adding adding the death toll would likely increase. “So many incidents occurred at several Islamic schools.”

Aprizal Mulyadi told the BBC that he was at school when the quake hit, and was trapped after “the room collapsed.” The 14-year-old said his “legs were buried under the rubble,” but he was pulled to safety by his friend Zulfikar, who later died after himself becoming trapped.

Earthquakes are nearly a daily occurrence in Indonesia. The island nation sits along the Ring of Fire, an arc of volcanoes and fault lines along the Pacific Basin, stretching from Japan to Indonesia on one side of the Pacific Ocean and California and South America on the other side.

[Related: Experts predict dozens more earthquake aftershocks in Puerto Rico.]

In 2018, more than 2,000 people were killed during an earthquake off the island of Sulawesi. A historic 9.1 magnitude quake off Sumatra island in northern Indonesia in 2004 and triggered a tsunami that struck 14 countries, killing 226,000 people along the coastline of the Indian Ocean, with more than half of the casualties in Indonesia.

Landslides often follow the earthquakes and deforestation and gold mining operations have made the soil increasingly unstable.

The sloping, hilly terrain near epicenter of the earthquake, made the area especially vulnerable to landslides, according to Ridwan. The damage to homes appeared to be worse in villages farther outside Cianjur and deeper into the hills.

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The planet is currently in a rare triple-dip La Niña year, but climate change will likely affect the opposite weather system El Niño as well. These fluctuations in the sea surface temperature near the equator in the Pacific Ocean can weather around the world.

But just how much these systems will be impacted has been up in the air. However, a new study, published this week in the journal Nature Communications, finds that climate change is expected to strengthen El Niño and La Niña events by 2030.

In the study, researchers analyzed 70 years of sea surface temperature data from the Pacific Ocean. They used this data to model the changes in the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) alongside the expected projections of continued global warming.

[Related: The past 8 years have been the hottest on human record, according to new report.]

ENSO represents Earth’s most significant year-to-year fluctuation in the climate and it can be a major driver of floods and droughts around the world. Differences in sea surface temperature in the Pacific fluctuate and switches between three main stages, warm El Niño, cold La Niña, and neutral.

During a La Niña event, ocean surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean cool, alongside changes in tropical atmospheric circulation (mostly winds), barometric pressure, and rainfall. Importantly, this cooling doesn’t mean that global-warming is letting up. The colder surface waters in the Pacific Ocean push the jet stream north, which tends to lead to drought conditions in the southern part of the United States and heavy rains and flooding in the Pacific Northwest and Canada. Winter temperatures are warmer than normal in the South and cooler than normal in the North during a La Niña year, and the weather event can also lead to a more severe Atlantic hurricane season.

El Niño has the opposite affect on global weather patterns: the trade winds weaken and warm water is pushed toward the west coast of the Americas. The Pacific jet stream moves south, giving areas in the northern US and Canada dryer and warmer than usual conditions, and wetter conditions in the Southeast and Gulf Coast. The Pacific jet stream moves south, giving areas in the northern US and Canada dryer and warmer than usual conditions, and wetter conditions in the Southeast and Gulf Coast.

[Related: Fossil fuels are causing a buildup of human health problems.]

Previous studies have suggested that these events may vary depending on where in the warm or cold ocean temperatures are located within the Pacific. According to the authors, this study sought to model how climate change will play into El Niño and La Niña events and where these changes in weather patterns could be detected.

The models found that climate change’s influence on El Niño and La Niña in the form of ocean surface temperature changes in the eastern Pacific will be detectable in only eight years, close to 40 years earlier than previously thought, potentially causing even more extreme weather events.

According to study co-author Wenju Cai, an oceans and atmosphere research scientist at CSIRO, it has been hard to identify where the change is occurring most strongly since ENSO’s oscillation is very complex and variable. “However, our study shows the effect of climate change, manifesting as changes in ocean surface temperature in the tropical eastern Pacific, will be obvious and unambiguous within about eight years,” Cai writes.

The study finds that Australia particularly needs to prepare for more floods and drought and the entire world face must be prepared for affects on human health, food production, global economies, and more

“Our findings should be incorporated into policies and strategies to adapt to climate change,” writes Cai. “And crucially, they add to the weight of evidence pointing to the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to stabilise Earth’s climate.”

The study comes as the United Nations annual conference on climate change (COP27) draws to a close.

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Every dark cloud has a silver lining. At any given time, about 67 percent of Earth’s skies are covered with them. 

In comparison to what we know about other aspects of Earth’s atmosphere, scientists still know relatively little about how clouds form. Now, an international group led by researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder has found that iodine—a naturally occurring chemical element—contributes to increased cloud cover and eats away at the ozone layer, the thin part of Earth’s atmosphere that absorbs nearly all of the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays. Their research, published November 14 in the journal Nature Chemistry, details a new link between sources of iodine, how they’re emitted into the atmosphere, and how it helps clouds form and grow. 

“Predicting accurately where, how, and how many clouds will form is extremely difficult,” says Henning Finkenzeller, lead author of the study and now a postdoctoral student at the University of Helsinki. “It’s one of the major uncertainties in today’s climate models.” Taking a closer look at clouds can be a vitally important approach to helping find solutions to climate change, Finkenzeller says. 

However, the first step is understanding the various intricacies of our climate system, including the role elements, like iodine, might play in clouds and the atmosphere. Many people are often taught a simplified version of the cloud formation process: clouds form when water vapor turns into liquid water droplets, which results in many different species—or categories—of these white wisps. But the process is actually a bit more complex than that. 

[Related: Is ‘cloud seeding’ actually helping fight drought?]

To get a better grasp at how clouds coalesce, it’s worth knowing that all living organisms have some trace elements of iodine inside them. In humans, for example, iodine helps create hormones that control the body’s metabolism and supports bone and brain development during pregnancy. After the 1986 Chernobyl incident, there was even an effort to distribute potassium iodide pills with the hopes of warding off the negative health effects of radiation. But while iodine has been studied for hundreds of years in water solutions, it’s only in the last two decades that scientists have made strides in learning how its gas phase can influence the behavior of Earth’s atmosphere. The team’s study details which chemical reaction in the gaseous state transforms one form of iodine into a chemical compound called iodic acid, which has a catalytic role in atmospheric particle formation—when molecules in the air corral together to form cloud droplets. 

“You cannot form a cloud droplet from condensing pure water,” says Rainer Volkamer, co-author of the study and a professor of chemistry at the University of Colorado Boulder. “You need a kind of seed, a particle on which water then can condense to kind of form a cloud droplet.” That seed, he says, is iodine, as the element contributes very efficiently to the formation of those essential particles. 

Most of the iodine found in the atmosphere comes from the ocean, where it exists as iodide, a reduced form of the element that can also be found in table salt. But the element’s presence in the atmosphere has increased in the last several decades due to how the ocean is responding to atmospheric pollution. “This natural source of iodine is about three times as large today as it was only 70 years ago,” says Volkamer. More clouds in the sky may not sound particularly harmful, but increased cloud cover could worsen the thinning of arctic sea ice. According to NASA, arctic sea ice is shrinking at a rate of about 12.6 percent per decade as a result of global warming. And that’s before taking into account iodine’s depleting effect on the ozone layer. 

[Related: Five reasons you shouldn’t take cloud cover for granted.]

But to study their theory further, the team was part of a collaboration that conducted an experiment called Cosmics Leaving Outdoor Droplets (CLOUD) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), where they tested different combinations of near-atmospheric conditions to watch how particles formed and evolved. Later on, they also tested their findings at Maido observatory at Réunion Island, a remote island east of Madagascar. “There’s not so many places in the world where one can study how the atmosphere is not influenced [by] humans,” says Finkenzeller. There, members of the team spent 10 weeks using all types of scientific instruments to characterize different molecules on the island. Eventually, they concluded that this real-world data did indeed match up with their laboratory results. 

Overall, Finkenzeller notes that iodine is neither a good nor bad chemical element. How humans continue to interact with it, however, will be one of the deciding factors in how strongly iodine will impact Earth’s future, for better or worse.

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In August 2014, the Arctic Ocean near the North Pole was suddenly awash with microscopic life—gripped by an algae bloom that covered the Laptev Sea, a large chunk of the East Siberian Sea, and part of the open Arctic Ocean. In a regular year, late summer is a quiet time for the Arctic. Long past is the regular spring phytoplankton bloom that supports so much activity. By August, the algae that bloomed in the spring have sucked most of the nitrogen out of the water, leaving the region practically devoid of microscopic creatures and the larger animals that eat them. So where did this bloom come from?

Because the Arctic Ocean ecosystem is typically limited by the availability of nitrogen, researchers including Douglas Hamilton, an atmospheric scientist at North Carolina State University, started looking for where a glut of the nutrient might have come from to trigger the bloom. One by one, Hamilton and his colleagues examined various ocean-based sources, such as the upwelling of cold nutrient-rich water or the runoff from rivers. Nothing seemed to add up.

Convinced that no oceanic source was bringing in enough excess nitrogen to spark such a massive bloom, the scientists were left with just one option. “The only place left was the atmosphere,” Hamilton says.

Eventually, the scientists pinned down the most likely culprit: huge wildfires that were raging across Siberia thousands of kilometers south—fires that were burning through forests and, notably, nitrogen-rich peat. The smoke from those fires had drifted north where it deposited its nitrogen in the nutrient-starved water.

The work echoes a similar study, published last year, which shows that iron in the aerosols from wildfires in Australia in late 2019 and early 2020 fertilized anomalous algae blooms in the Southern Ocean. Joan Llort, a biogeochemical oceanographer at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center in Spain who worked on that study, says that as wildfires increase in frequency and intensity because of climate change, especially at higher latitudes, we may see more of these fertilization events and increasing numbers of blooms in traditionally nutrient-poor regions.

“We can’t say for certain yet as we have only recorded a couple of these events so far, but it seems to be going in that direction,” Llort says.

For many coastal areas, more algae blooms could be a problem. Some algae release toxins, while the decomposition of all that phytoplankton can deplete oxygen levels in the water. Increasing wildfires in California, for instance, could bring more harmful blooms to the Pacific coast, says Llort.

In the Arctic, however, the changes could be much more profound.

The Far North is undergoing a process of “borealization.” Rapidly warming and increasingly ice-free, the Arctic Ocean is coming to look a lot more like the North Atlantic. In fact, fish from boreal regions farther south are already shifting north, chasing their preferred water temperature. But the Arctic Ocean is much less productive than the North Atlantic. Even though the temperature is right, these migrating fish are not finding everything they need to survive. For these new arrivals to thrive, the Arctic Ocean will require big new inputs of nutrients to support them. Like the input from wildfires.

For the Arctic Ocean, then, if increasing wildfires and the 2014 bloom are a sign of things to come, this higher flow of nutrients could transform Arctic ecosystems.

“If we keep seeing more of this in the future,” Hamilton says, “we can expect the Arctic Ocean to be getting significantly more nitrogen than it has been for the past several thousand years.”

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Storm-weary Florida is bracing for a very late season hurricane as Tropical Storm Nicole approaches the state’s eastern coast. The storm is expected to strengthen into a Category 1 hurricane and hit Florida later today after drenching the Bahamas. Hurricane warnings are in place for about 4 million people and the storm is anticipated to make landfall north of West Palm Beach, Florida.

“Nicole is expected to weaken while moving across Florida and the southeastern United States Thursday through Friday,” the National Hurricane Center said this morning.

Parts of the east coast of Florida were already experiencing tropical storm conditions early this morning. The state is also facing very high tides elevated by this week’s full moon, which could increase coastal flooding. Forecasters predict up to eight inches of rain, a storm surge that could rise to five feet, and high winds into Thursday.

[Related: Hurricane Ian surges back and heads for the Carolinas.]

As of 7 a.m. EST Wednesday, the storm had sustained winds of 70 MPH, only four MPH away from becoming a Category 1 hurricane, according to the NHC.

Nicole will be impacting some of the Florida counties that are still recovering from September’s Hurricane Ian. The historic Category 4 storm killed over 100 people and destroyed several communities on the state’s west coast.

Atlantic hurricane season does not officially end until November 30, but late-season hurricanes are incredibly rare in the United States. If Nicole hits as a hurricane, it will be the first one to make landfall in the United States in November in nearly 40 years, when Hurricane Kate hit the Florida panhandle as a Category 2 storm in 1985.

“November is not known for its tropical activity,” said Dan Kottlowski, AccuWeather’s chief hurricane expert. “By November, the westerlies are well entrenched across the southern U.S. and into the northern Gulf of Mexico,” he said, in reference to the prevailing winds that blow from the west towards the east in the middle latitudes. “The only opportunity for tropical development is in the southern Gulf of Mexico and over the Caribbean. Even there, strong vertical wind shear can make it rather difficult for tropical formation.”

[Related: The future of hurricanes is full of floods—a lot of them.]

November is historically when ocean water begins to cool and wind shears make tropical systems less likely to form. But warming ocean temperatures due to climate change is changing how hurricanes work, even this late in the season.

“Since 1995, sea surface temperatures have averaged above normal across the Atlantic Basin through November, and the central Atlantic has been no exception,” Kottlowski said. “Since we now have much better satellite data over the Atlantic, it’s easier to catch late-season and short-lived tropical cyclones in the central and far eastern Atlantic. Rina of 2017 was a good example of this.”

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All kinds of natural disasters—hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, wildfires, dangerous heat waves—pose substantial risks to older adults. Yet, not enough seniors prepare for these events in advance, and efforts to encourage them to do so have been largely unsuccessful.

The most recent horrific example was Hurricane Ian, the massive storm that in September smashed into Florida’s southwestern coast—a haven for retirees—with winds up to 150 mph and storm surges exceeding 12 feet in some areas. At least 120 people died, most of them in Florida. Of those who perished, two-thirds were 60 or older. Many reportedly drowned and were found in their homes.

Why didn’t more older adults leave for safer areas, as authorities recommended? Understanding this is critically important as the population of older people expands and natural disasters become more frequent and intense with climate change.

“I think the story of Hurricane Ian that people will remember is the story of people who didn’t evacuate,” said Jeff Johnson, AARP’s Florida state director.

Even before the storm, there were worrisome signs that disaster preparedness was lagging. In an AARP survey this summer of 1,005 Florida residents 45 and older, 67% reported having a natural disaster emergency plan, compared with 75% in 2019. The declines were most notable among people with low incomes (less than $50,000 a year) and those who owned their homes.

Meanwhile, 61% of Florida residents 45 and older said they planned to shelter in place during the next bad storm. In 2019, the comparable figure was 55%.

Johnson said concerns about the covid-19 pandemic and inflation’s impact on budgets may have contributed to “a lot of people who were just not mentally prepared to leave.” More broadly, he faulted disaster preparation checklists that target seniors.

Mostly, these resources tell older adults to complete a long list of tasks before a crisis occurs. “Coming out of Ian, what’s become clear is that giving seniors materials with lots of steps they need to follow ends up being overwhelming,” Johnson told me. “The checklists aren’t working.”

Among the items that seniors are advised to assemble: enough nonperishable food, water, and medications for several days; cash for 30 days of living expenses; hearing aids and glasses; flashlights and battery-powered lamps; extra batteries; and first-aid supplies.

Beyond that, older adults are encouraged to create a list of people who can help them in an emergency, familiarize themselves with evacuation routes, arrange for transportation, and compile essential documents such as wills, powers of attorney, and lists of their medical providers and medications.

Doing all this is especially challenging for older adults with hearing and vision impairments, cognitive problems, difficulties with mobility, and serious chronic illnesses such as heart disease or diabetes.

Also at heightened risk are seniors without cars, cellphones that broadcast emergency alerts, extra money for lodging, or family members and friends who can help them get organized or take them in, if necessary, according to Lori Peek, director of the Natural Hazards Center and a professor of sociology at the University of Colorado-Boulder.

“It’s not age alone that renders elderly people vulnerable in disasters,” she noted. “It’s the intersection of age with other social forces” that affects people who are poor and represent racial and ethnic minorities.

This lesson has been painfully learned during the covid pandemic, which has killed enormous numbers of vulnerable seniors. But it hasn’t been incorporated into disaster preparedness and response yet.

Sue Anne Bell, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, who studies the health effects of disasters, said this must change. “We need to focus disaster preparedness on these vulnerable populations,” she said, adding that a one-size-fits-all approach won’t work and that outreach to vulnerable seniors needs to be tailored to their particular circumstances.

Coming up with better strategies to boost older adults’ ability to cope with disasters should be a national priority, not one specific to areas beset by hurricanes, because lack of preparedness is widespread.

In May 2019, Bell’s colleagues at the University of Michigan’s National Poll on Healthy Aging surveyed 2,256 adults ages 50 to 80 about emergency planning for natural or man-made disasters. Although nearly 3 in 4 respondents said they had experienced an event of this kind, just over half had a week’s supply of food and water available, and only 40% said they had talked to family or friends about how they would evacuate if necessary.

Least likely to have prepared for emergencies were seniors who live alone, a growing portion of the older population.

Of enormous concern are older adults with Alzheimer’s disease or other types of cognitive impairment living in their own homes, a larger group than those living in institutions.

When Lindsay Peterson, a research assistant professor at the University of South Florida, interviewed 52 family caregivers in 2021 and 2022, all of them said they would never take a loved one with dementia to a disaster shelter. Although Florida has created “special needs” shelters for people with disabilities or medical concerns, they’re noisy and chaotic and lack privacy.

Even older adults without dementia are loath to go to shelters because of these issues and because they don’t want to identify themselves as needing assistance, Peek noted.

Using feedback from her research, Peterson this year created a disaster preparedness guide for dementia caregivers in concert with the Alzheimer’s Association that presents information in an easy-to-understand format.

“A lot of caregivers told us, ‘Please help us do this but make it simpler. Every day I wake up and there’s a new crisis,’” Peterson said.

She noted that institutions such as nursing homes have been a focus of disaster planning for older adults in the wake of disasters such as Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005 and Superstorm Sandy, which hit the New York City metro area and New Jersey especially hard in 2012.

Now, the field needs to do more to address the needs of the vast majority of older adults who live at home, Peterson suggested.

What might that include? A report published by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and AARP in July calls for bringing together organizations that serve older adults and local, state, and federal agencies responsible for emergency preparedness on a regular basis. Together, they could plan for reducing the impact of disasters on seniors.

Separately, a January 2020 report by the American Red Cross and the American Academy of Nursing recommends that home health agencies and other organizations serving older adults at home develop plans for helping clients through disasters. And more opportunities for older adults to participate in community-based disaster training should be made available.

Think of this as age-friendly disaster planning. Until now, the focus has been on individuals taking responsibility for themselves. This is a more communal approach, focused on building a stronger network of community support for older adults in times of crisis.

“All of us are thinking now that communities can’t be age-friendly or dementia-friendly if they’re not disaster-resilient,” said Johnson of AARP Florida. “And everyone who’s been through Ian, I suspect, will be more vigilant going forward, because people have been scared straight.”

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

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On January 15, 2022, we were once again reminded of the immense power lurking beneath the planet. On that day, Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai, a submarine volcano in the south Pacific Ocean about 40 miles north of Tonga’s main island of Tongatapu, violently erupted. After the the initial rumblings on December 20, 2021, the climax of the eruption in January pushed a huge plume of water and ash into the air, that traveled 36 miles into the Earth’s mesosphere (the atmosphere’s middle layer). It created a tsunami that reached Japan and the Americas and even severed submarine cables, cutting off Tonga’s communication with the rest of the world for a full month.

Almost one year later, researchers in the University of Oxford’s Department of Physics and RAL Space published research on satellite imagery confirming that this eruption produced the highest-ever recorded volcanic plume. It was also first to have been directly observed going into the mesosphere. The results of the study are published today in the journal Science.

[Related: Geologists: We’re not ready for volcanoes.]

“I actually come from a weather rather than volcanology background and the fact this eruption was caught so clearly by multiple weather satellites drove me to begin the study,” lead author and research fellow Simon Proud says in an interview with PopSci. “The main motivation was to test out ideas for how useful these weather sats are for examining extreme events.”

Scientists can typically estimate the height of a volcanic plume using infrared-based satellites to take the temperature recorded at the top of the plume and compare it to a vertical temperature profile. In the first and lowest layer of the Earth’s atmosphere called the troposphere, temperature decreases with height. However, if the eruption is large enough to push the plume into the next layer, (the stratosphere) this method doesn’t work as well because the temperature begins to increase again with height. This increase is due to the ozone layer absorbing solar ultraviolet radiation from the sun.

To solve this, Proud and the team used a method based on a phenomenon called the parallax effect, or the apparent difference in an object’s position when viewed from multiple lines of sight. A way to test this out is to close your right eye and hold out one hand with the thumb raised. If you then switch and close your left eye, and open the right, the thumb will appear to shift slightly. You can then calculate the distance to your thumb by measuring this apparent change in position and combining this with the known and easily measurable distance between your eyes.

[Related: Volcanic eruptions are unpredictable, but these geologists cracked the code.]

“The parallax effect is really useful for this as it doesn’t suffer from the limitations of other methods. Traditionally, we use the temperature of the plume to figure out how high it went, but that relies on an accurate knowledge of the atmospheric temperature at different altitudes, which isn’t possible during a large eruption!” says Proud. “Parallax just needs a couple of satellite images from different locations and no other info, so it’s simple and accurate.”

Three geostationary weather satellites cover the location of the volcano, so the team used the aerial images captured and apply the parallax effect to them. The satellites recorded images every 10 minutes during the eruption. This crucial data made sure that the rapid changes in the plume’s trajectory could be documented.

According to the results in the study, plume reached an altitude of 35 miles at its highest. This plume is higher than two of the the previous record-holders: Mount Pinatubo’s 1991 eruption in the Philippines (24 miles high) and the 1982 eruption of El Chichón in Mexico (19 miles high).

“The height, of course, was surprising,” says Proud. “Also, the way the height changed—we had a big peak in height that then fell away 10 minutes later, before another big peak after that. It was really surprising to see the height varying so much, so quickly.”

This plume also provides the first observational evidence of a volcanic eruption injecting material through the stratosphere and directly into the mesosphere, which is roughly 31 to 53 miles above the Earth.

Proud stressed that it is vital to continue to study these eruptions to provide better warnings and predictions of lava flows or tsunamis for those who are in harm’s way. It was also important to study if this specific eruption will be useful for climate modelers. “The climate effects of the eruption itself are quite limited, but the fact it put so much water, ash, and other debris so high into the atmosphere is a great way to test how climate models handle these situations, whether they can predict the effects,” he said.

The team’s next step is constructing an automated system that can compute the heights of volcano plumes using the parallax method. The full automation of manual calculations will speed up the process of measuring plumes.

To Proud, one thing is clear, this kind of study does not occur in a vacuum and needs expertise in multiple different areas of study to succeed.

“I think the key thing this eruption shows is how intertwined different aspects of science are now. We’re often taught in school that there’s physics, chemistry, and computing, as separate subjects,” he adds. “But they’re all so closely linked now. Our research brings together engineering, physics, math, and lots of computing.”

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Google first began testing its AI-assisted Flood Hub back in 2018, a digital tool aimed at providing users around the world with accurate, crucial real-time tracking and predictions for flooding events. Although it initially debuted in India’s Patna region, an area known for devastating flooding, within the next two years coverage expanded to encompass the entire country and parts of Bangladesh, eventually issuing over 115 million alerts regarding impending emergencies such as the latter country’s June 2022 floods.

Yesterday, Google announced a massive expansion of not only its predictive flood alerts, but wildfire warnings, as well. In an official blog post, Yossi Matias, Google’s VP of Engineering and Research and Crisis Response Lead, explains that Flood Hub‘s reach extends to 20 countries’ flood basins, now including 15 nations in Africa alongside three more in Asia and Latin America. Every Android user in the covered areas can receive the alerts, alongside anyone else who installs the Google search app on their smartphones. Businesses and groups can also utilize the program, but must have internet access alongside enabling Google location services. A revamped interactive map also allows anyone to search in-network regions to see color-coded flood risk assessments, regardless of the own locations.

[Related: Flooding and food security are linked.]

As The Verge explains, Google is relying on an AI technique known as “transfer learning” to improve accuracy and lead-time for areas with less available data, in which models utilize various drainage basins’ data that can then be scaled to whatever area is needed. The updated technology is capable of providing warnings to up to a week ahead of time, as opposed to Google’s previous 48 hour window.

The disaster tracking also extends to wildfires, as well. Since its debut in 2020, the service utilized data from NASA and NOAA, but like Flood Hub, machine learning advancements are helping improve monitoring and prediction. The update encompasses US, Canada, Mexico, and areas of Australia, with more to come in the near future. “Since July, we’ve covered more than 30 big wildfire events in the US and Canada, helping inform people and firefighting teams with over 7 million views in Search and Maps,” Matias writes in Google’s blog post.

[Related: How climate change worsened Pakistan’s deadly flood.]

With many of climate change’s dramatic effects already a certainty for the planet’s future, creatively utilizing programs like AI and machine learning will be key to stem some of its worst fallout. The United Nations released a somber analysis of global natural disaster preparedness last month, revealing that half the planet’s nations do not possess the adequate warning systems most crucial for lifesaving population evacuations and protections. “The world is failing to invest in protecting the lives and livelihoods of those on the front line,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in a video statement at the time, adding that, “Those who have done the least to cause the climate crisis are paying the highest price.”

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The autumn season is always something to look forward to, particularly because of the spectacularly saturated, beautiful colors that many trees’ leaves produce just before they fall to Earth’s top-most layer of crust where they eventually turn to brown. They’re pretty, but those same leaves can leave nasty stains on your car’s paint.

Even though the mortal coil of their complex existence has come to an end, the chemicals that remain in their lifeless vessels can leave imprints on sheet metal. They can also clog HVAC vents and gutters, and even block air filters and radiator fins if you’re unlucky. Therefore, foliage accumulation is something to keep an eye on or avoid altogether if you’re able to. Plus, while you’ve got combatting foliage on the brain, you might as well be proactive and prepare your car for winter weather.

Mother Nature Doesn’t Mess Around

If you’re inclined to preserve your car’s paint as best as you can, tack on leaf mitigation as part of your DIY service planning.

Leaves contain acids and sap that release and wear your vehicle’s finishes, particularly its paint and trim pieces. The longer they sit, the more damage they do. Like bird poop. Plus, if they’re on there and get rained on for an extended period of time, think of it as a sort of natural wet blasting cabinet. Have you ever seen the prints of big leaves, leave, on a car that’s been parked for a while? Sometimes a standard wash won’t get rid of that, and more drastic measures must be taken, such as thorough buffing and waxing.

The best course of action is prevention. It’s a good idea to store your car under covered parking as much as possible, but if you don’t have this at your residence, consider buying a car cover to throw over it. Frequent washes and waxes help as well by not only cleaning off contaminants but also protecting the paint against them. The same goes for ceramic coatings, which are never a bad thing to invest in.

A quick tip: it’s a good idea to manually lift each and every leaf off of your car, rather than using a leaf blower or hose. This helps prevent them from rubbing across the paint finish, which depending on the intensity of your local flora and fauna can cause very faint scratching.

Leaves Clog Stuff Up

In addition to damaging your car’s paint, leaves also accumulate in any tiny crevice they can find their way into, especially between the hood of your car and its plastic cowling where HVAC intakes often reside.

This puts strain on the HVAC system and gives it a musty smell due to being clogged with moisture and decaying carbon-based material. Plus, if your car’s cabin filter is already clogged and ready to be changed, it could make matters worse if not addressed.

Not only that, but for vehicles that sit for a while, leaf buildup is appealing to critters of the arthropod and mammal variety—nobody wants a spider or mouse infestation in hard-to-reach areas. Leaf material can also jam up door and trunk seals and let rainwater in.

It’s unlikely, but not impossible, that enough leaves could get caught in a radiator, oil cooler, intercooler, or anything with cooling fins really, and block airflow to it causing suboptimal heating. Since ambient temperatures are usually pretty cool in the fall, your engine might not even notice if a big old Canadian flag-looking leaf was blocking a few square inches of your radiator, but it’s worth taking a look in your car’s grille once in a while to make sure you don’t have any big blockages.

By the same token, it’s not a bad idea to take a look at your air filter in the fall and make sure you don’t have a big, fat leaf hindering airflow.

Winter is Coming

Depending on the climate you live in, why not take the opportunity to do some exterior and interior maintenance before temperatures drop, snow hits the ground, and cars get blasted by salt in many areas of the country?

Rapidly rising and falling temperatures can do a number on interior trim pieces and leather, so fall is a good time to clean and condition them. Just imagine the temperature differential between a frigid, Chicago winter night and the proceding sunny day’s warm UV rays. Interiors really are put to the test in the wintertime.

If you’re already in the regular car wash mindset, consider giving your car’s bodywork, wheels, and tires an extra-thorough cleaning, followed by each components’ respective common protectants like wax, tire shine, and more. Especially after all the trees are finally bare—now the challenge lies in protecting against big temperature changes, salt, slushy road grime, and more. Plus, I imagine it might be easier for brake dust to get baked into wheels’ finishes, so don’t forget to clean and protect them as well.

With a little awareness, preparation, and elbow grease, you can ensure your car’s paint stays in tip-top shape no matter what Mother Nature throws at it during the fall and winter seasons.

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On Nov. 8, 2018, faulty electrical equipment in California’s Woolsey Valley sparked a wildfire that enveloped the Santa Monica Mountains. The Woolsey Fire burnt through nearly 100,000 acres of land on the western edge of the greater Los Angeles area, destroying over 1,600 structures and killing three people.

This mountainous landscape is the home territory of LA’s legendary mountain lions, which have held on here despite urbanization and habitat fragmentation. But the fire eliminated half of their remaining habitat, including 88% of the national park land in the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. Rachel Blakey, now a professor at Cal Poly Pomona, lived in LA at the time of the fire and began to wonder how the lions were affected. 

“I was a really big fan of the LA mountain lions, as most Angelenos are,” Blakey said. “And I thought, my goodness, what’s happened? How has this wildfire impacted them, when they already have this kind of hemmed-in area?”

The results of Blakey and her co-authors’ research were published in Current Biology on Oct. 20. Using GPS tracking to map the lions’ travels and accelerometer data to record their activity, she and her collaborators compared the animals’ behavior during the 15 months before and after the fire.

 Two lions died in the fire, but many more struggled to survive in the years that followed. Blakey described the charred landscape as a “moonscape” without the vegetation and cover that the cats need to ambush their preferred prey, mule deer.  The lions avoided the burned areas and took greater risks in search of better habitat, crossing busy highways. When they entered the territories of dominant males, interspecies conflict resulted.

Researcher Jeff Sikich, who has studied the Santa Monica population for more than two decades and worked on the research with Blakey, said in an interview that more mountain lions are killed by cars than any other cause. If the fire forced them to cross roads more often, even more deaths were likely.

A young male known as P-61 survived the fire, but in seeking out more suitable habitat afterward he became an indirect victim of it. He was the first collared mountain lion recorded crossing the 405, a major highway with heavy traffic. His initial crossing was successful, but he inadvertently entered the territory of another male, which attacked him and drove him out. Later, he was recorded contemplating a second crossing. But this time his luck ran out, and he was struck and killed by a vehicle.

In the aftermath of the fire, some residents expressed fears that mountain lions would move into more urbanized areas, the researchers reported. But their monitoring showed that the cats only marginally increased their time in such areas. The cats have a “strong tendency to avoid these urban areas,” Sikich said, and that remained true even after the fire. On average, they spent only 5% of their time in urban areas, with even the boldest spending no more than 15% of their time there. When a mountain lion known as P-64 was caught between a burned area and a busy urban space, he chose the smoldering vegetation over the chance of human contact. He was seriously burned, and, unable to hunt, he died.

Winston Vickers, a wildlife veterinarian and researcher with UC Davis, works with a similarly isolated mountain lion population in the Santa Ana Mountains on the eastern side of LA. He has also seen cases where animals would rather risk a fire than encroach on human spaces. “We’re getting more and more (isolated populations), especially in places like coastal California,” Vickers said. He said that the study is important for helping researchers understand how fire can impact isolated populations.

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After severe drought brought low water levels in Europe’s rivers this summer, revealing archeological finds and eerie hunger stones, the Mississippi River is facing similar conditions—and divulging similar historical oddities.

In Chester, Illinois, the river gauge of the Mississippi dropped to around zero last week, according to the Missouri Department of Conservation. Drone video of the Mississippi River near Memphis, Tennessee also reveals how far the 270-mile long river has contracted in recent months. In Memphis, the river dropped to minus-10.75 feet, a the lowest record ever recorded there, according to data from the National Weather Service.

[Related: The numbers show just how devastatingly dry the Western US is right now.]

In downtown Baton Rouge, Louisiana, resident Patrick Ford found the shipwrecked remains of the Brookhill, a trading vessel dating back to the early 20th Century. The low-water levels exposed the remains earlier this month. “I immediately texted friends and was like, ‘holy moly, I think I found a ship, a sunken ship!'” Ford told WBRZ, the city’s ABC News affiliate.

Lousiana state archaeologist Chip McGimsey said that they’ve known about the Brookhill for quite some time. “We believe this is a ship that was manufactured in 1896 in Indiana for trade here,” McGimsey explained to WBRZ. This ship along with its sister ship the Istrouma faced destruction. “On September 29th of 1915, there was a big storm… both ships sank.”

Istrouma broke from the ferry dock, but Brookhill stayed grounded in the river. “In 1992, [Brookhill ] was was exposed, an archeological firm did some work. At that time, it was not nearly as exposed as it is now,” McGimsey said.

Further north in Clarksdale, Mississippi, Crystal Foster found human remains while looking for rocks. According to the local county’s Chief Medical Examiner Scotty Meredith, the remains include a lower jawbone, rib bones, and some unidentified bone pieces.

[Related: The American West is drier than it’s been in at least 1,200 years.]

“I just hope that the MBI [Mississippi Bureau of Investigation] works quickly on this case and is able to identify the victim to the dental records at the very least so that way their family can get closure because that would bring me some peace at least,” Foster told WMC, the region’s NBC News affiliate.

Salt water from the Gulf of Mexico is also creeping up the river, and the Army Corps of engineers is building a 1,500 foot wide underwater levee to keep salt out of Louisiana’s drinking water.

According to the US Drought Monitor, severe drought is covering more than 70 percent of Arkansas and close to 40 percent of Missouri, an increase from only five percent in September. Memphis, Fayetteville, Arkansas, and Springfield, Missouri have all seen record-low precipitation over the last few weeks. The area is forecast to get some much needed rain this week from the remnants of Hurricane Roslyn, but the long-term forecast remains incredibly dry. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) anticipates that the region’s drought will persist through January 2023.

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Weather radar has been known to pick swarms of grasshoppers, dragonflies, and possibly cicadas as they take to the sky. While these big brigades of bugs aren’t generating their own rain showers or thunderstorms, the organisms carry with them a very small electrical charge that could impact electricity in the atmosphere as they fly. But just how much of a charge can the buzzing of the bees create?

The short answer is a lot. A team of scientists in the United Kingdom measured the electrical fields near swarming honeybees and found that the insects can produce as much atmospheric electric charge as a thunderstorm cloud. Their research was published today in the journal iScience and demonstrates how this type of electricity can shape weather events, help insects find food, and even lift spiders up in the air when they migrate.

[Related: When insects got wings, evolution really took off.]

“We study how different organisms use the static electric fields that are virtually everywhere in the environment,” study first author Ellard Hunting, a biologist at the University of Bristol, says in an email to Popular Science. “For instance, flowers have an electric field and bees can sense these fields. And these electric fields of flowers can change when it has been visited by a bee, and other bees can use that information to see whether a flower has been visited. Or trees create an increased electric field in the atmosphere, and spiders can use this electric field to take off, and balloon, allowing them to migrate over large distances.”

The team found that honeybee hive swarms change the atmospheric electricity by 100 to 1,000 volts per meter, which increases the electric field force that is normally experienced at ground level rather than in the air. They then developed a a model that can predict the electrical influence of other species of insects. When comparing thunderstorms and other weather events with the the bees’ highest charge, the authors found that a dense swarm of bees had a higher electric charge. The bees had a charge density that was about eight times greater a thunderstorm cloud and six times greater than an electrified dust storm.

“How insect swarms influence atmospheric electricity depends on their density and size,” co-author Liam O’Reilly, also a biologist at the University of Bristol, said in a press release. “We also calculated the influence of locusts on atmospheric electricity, as locusts swarm on biblical scales, sizing 460 square miles with 80 million locusts in less than a square mile; their influence is likely much greater than honeybees.”

[Related: These insects preserved in amber are still glowing 99 million years later.]

The bees most likely acquire their charge through the friction they face during flight. While it would take about 50 billion bees to light one LED light, they can actually increase the background atmospheric electric field two to 10 fold, which Hunting called a “big surprise. “This makes it the first report of biology as a source of biogenic space charge, which can be as relevant as physical phenomena such as clouds,” he tells PopSci.

The discovery of electrical fields happened shortly after Benjamin Franklin’s famous kite experiment, but scientists are still trying to unlock the secrets of electricity as it exists in nature.

“We only recently discovered that biology and static electric fields are intimately linked and that there are many unsuspected links that can exist over different spatial scales, ranging from microbes in the soil and plant-pollinator interactions to insect swarms and the global electric circuit,” says Hunting. “This makes it an exciting new area of empirical research. The true implications of this remain speculative, and whether these dynamics induced by insects affect weather is definitely worth investigating.”

According to Hunting, understanding electric charge in the atmosphere can answer questions in fields beyond physics, including how and why dust particles can be found thousands of miles away from the Sahara Desert. “The true implications of this remain speculative, and whether these dynamics induced by insects affect weather is definitely worth investigating,” said Hunting.

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Hurricane Roslyn, a powerful Category 3 storm, made landfall yesterday near Santa Cruz in the state of Nayarit, Mexico. The small beach town sits between the popular resorts of Puerto Vallarta and Mazatlán. Puerto Vallarta missed a direct hit from the storm, but was hit with heavy rains, high winds, and storm surges.

The storm lashed the coast with maximum sustained winds of 120 miles per hour, before dissipating to a tropical storm as it moved over east-central Mexico, according to the National Hurricane Center (NHC).

“This rainfall could lead to flash flooding and landslides in areas of rugged terrain,” the NHC added. “Swells generated by Roslyn will affect portions of the coast of southwestern Mexico, west-central Mexico, and the southern portion of the Baja California peninsula through tonight [Sunday]. These swells are likely to cause life-threatening surf and rip current conditions.”

[Related: Category 4 Hurricane Ian hits Florida, bringing historic storm surge.]

Nearly 100,000 people had lost power across the country, while some residents faced road blockages from fallen trees or mud.

At least two casualties related to the storm have been reported. Ana Pimentel Moreno, a 39 year-old woman from the Rosamorada municipality was killed when her house collapsed according to Nayarit Secretary of Security Jorge Benito Rodríguez Martínez. The secretary added that there had been other rescues of individuals trapped in their homes. Additionally, a 74-year-old man was killed when a beam fell on his head in the town of Mexcaltitan de Santiago Ixcuintla, according to Reuters and officials from the state’s Ministry of Security and Citizen Protection.

According to Enrique Alfaro, the governor of the neighboring state of Jalisco, schools in the state would reopen on Monday. Operations had resumed at Puerto Vallarta’s busy airport, but beaches would remain closed.

Weather forecasters say some of the lingering moisture from the storm will be pulled into the south-central United States, spreading heavy rain across much of the country.

[Related: What hurricane categories mean, and why we use them.]

Similar to Florida’s Hurricane Ian in late September, Hurricane Roslyn had a rapid intensification over the weekend. The storm’s wind speeds increased by 60 mph over a 24-hour period off the formed off the western coast of Mexico. It also followed a similar track to Hurricane Orlene, a storm that made landfall on October 3. Orlene made landfall as a Category 1 storm, but had been a Category 4 while it churned in the Pacific ocean.

Data shows that hurricanes have become stronger around the world over the last 40 years, with climate change as the driving force. Warmer ocean water fuels hurricane growth, which can fuel stronger and wetter storms. It’s likely that Hurricane Harvey, which devastated the Houston area in 2017, generated far more rain than that it would have without the effects of human-made climate change.

Roslyn is the 17th storm of this year’s East Pacific hurricane season, which begins on May 15 and runs through November 30.

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Thousands of residents have left their homes as a wildfire near the Washington State-Oregon border continues to burn. The Nakia Creek Wildfire has already charred about 2,000 acres according to the Washington State Department of Natural Resources. The fire itself was about 1,565 acres in size yesterday, according to officials from Clark County, Washington. The fire is about 5 percent contained.

The fire began on October 9 near Vancouver, Washington Nakia Creek Fire, ignited near Vancouver, Washington, (about 10 miles outside of Portland, Oregon) and it broke containment lines on Sunday October 16. It’s estimated that it grew from 156 acres to 2,000 acres in only a matter of hours due in large part to a combination of extremely warm temperatures, low humidity, and high wind speeds. Temperatures reached a steamy 86 degrees on Sunday, compared to the average temperatures in the low 60s this time of year.

[Related: Don’t blame national forests for America’s massive wildfires.]

Earlier last week, firefighters reported progress containing the blaze, but winds increased and fanning the flames that was able to feed on dry grass, timber, and brush. The fire was 5 percent contained by Sunday night. “The easterly winds were so strong today that air assets were grounded at times for safety,” Clark Regional Emergency Services Agency officials said in an evening update on Sunday.

While weather conditions improved yesterday, the Clark Regional Emergency Services Agency said there are still plenty of uncertainties.

Level 3 Go Now notices were sent to about 3,000 homes, telling them to evacuate. About 5,000 additional homes received Level 2 Be Set notices, that urge residents there to be ready for evacuation, and close to 30,000 homes are under Level 1 Be Ready notice.

Officials in Clark County said that the 2022 fire season has been particularly long for fire crews in Washington State. Fire season typically is over in this area by October and the numerous wildfires in the Cascade Mountains are decreasing air quality throughout the region.

“With the current weather patterns here in the PNW, we have another good week of potential fire weather,” Clark Regional Emergency Services Agency officials said, describing a fire official telling crews that “while the calendar may say it’s October 16th … I need you to think like it’s August 16th.”

Other cities in the region saw record high temperatures over the weekend, with Seattle, Washington hitting 88 degrees. It was the second-warmest October day on record, breaking the daily record of 72 degrees set in 2018.

[Related: What it really means for a wildfire to be ‘contained’.]

On Monday the Clark County Sheriff’s Office urged people to stay out of the evacuation zones. “Stay out of area if you don’t need to be there. Weather is improving and will allow more aerial firefighting opportunities, but can’t if drones are up,” the sheriff’s office tweeted.

The approaching flames from the fire forced farmers Shaun and Lorrie Conway to quickly round up their 50 goats and sheep, but abandon their other possessions. In an interview with NBC News, Lorrie Conway recounted, “It’s just stuff. I mean we got the animals out, and grabbed pictures and important documents and the house plants, in case we got to build it again.”

Wildfires like this one are getting worse due hotter temperatures and drier conditions in the American west due to climate change. It is making “fire seasons” last longer and begin earlier. According to a 2019 study areas in the United States like the grasslands of the Great Plains and the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains, will be at particular risk for fires that begin in the spring due to a likely increase in drought, dry soils, and late-spring frosts, which can create more dead fuel.

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Following this summer’s devastating floods in the United States, European Union, and a “monsoon on steroids” that left one-third of Pakistan under water, it is becoming increasingly clear that rising floodwaters are a dangerous part of our future with continued climate change. The collateral damage doesn’t go away when the flood waters recede. There is emotional trauma and post traumatic stress disorder, expensive material loss, and a study published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) is taking a closer look at the affects of all this excess water on food insecurity.

The authors examined more than a dozen countries across western, eastern, and southern Africa and found that flooding can affect food security for over 5.6 million people across the continent.

[Related: How climate change fed Pakistan’s devastating floods.]

“Our findings show that floods can impact food security both immediately and in the months after the flood event,” Connor Reed, a former New York University Center for Data Science graduate student and lead author on the study, said in a press release. “In many flood events we assessed, there were substantial damages to infrastructure, croplands, and livestock, which compromised food production and access, as well as water resources and sanitation also critical to food security.”

Between 2009-2020, the researchers studied how key flood characteristics, including location, duration, and extent, influence the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) scale. This is a food insecurity metric used by USAID’s Famine Early Warning System. It measures the severity of food insecurity using a five-point scale, ranging from minimal food security (IPC 1) up to famine (IPC 5). Approximately 12 percent of those who experienced food insecurity were affected by flooding’s devastating impacts over the 2009 to 2020 timeframe included in the study.

However, there were some beneficial impacts that remedied food insecurity, depending on the time period and regional scale. 

“Our results suggest that floods can have opposing effects on food security at different spatial scales, particularly at time periods after they occur,” study co-author Weston Anderson, a research scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the University of Maryland’s Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center, said in a press release. “In a given year, excess precipitation may immediately lead to floods that destroy crops in a localized area while also being associated with beneficial growing conditions that boost crop production on the country-scale.”

However, the team cautions that any positive impacts from flooding are not guaranteed to be felt by all. These beneficial findings instead make a case for improved data collection on flood and food security to better aid both climate adaptation planning and disaster response.  

[Related: Why we’re going to see a rapid rise in sunny day floods.]

“What we highlight in particular is that flooding has important but complicated impacts on food security at different times and spatial scales,” Sonali Shukla McDermid, an associate professor in NYU’s Department of Environmental Studies, said in a press release. “This is however largely understudied globally, and therefore not well understood. Improving knowledge of where, when, and to what extent floods affect food security is crucial, especially for decision-makers across flood-prone rural areas that contribute to regional and global food supplies.”

The study also found that food security is affected in highly localized and varying ways, instead of more uniformly across countries. The team says this is evidence that the relationship between flooding and food security is not due to dynamics that vary by individual country, such as, changes in food prices, but instead to, “context-specific impacts on food production.” This kind of impact includes, subsistence crop loss, destruction of infrastructure creating difficulty in accessing food, and sanitation deficiencies that lead to water-borne illness.

“Understanding flood impacts on food security is of growing importance for the humanitarian community,” co-author Andrew Kruczkiewicz of the International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia University said in a press release. “With the outputs of this study, the humanitarian community is in a better position to decide what actions, including anticipatory, preparedness and response, to prioritize—or deprioritize—in the areas we studied.”

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This article was originally featured on High Country News.

Editor’s note: This story contains a graphic description relating to the loss of a child.

The heat was in the triple digits when Lea Bossler and her U.S. Forest Service engine crew reached the blaze unfurling in a canyon outside Nogales, Arizona. As she trekked up a hill with her shovel-like rhino tool, flaming barrel cacti tumbled down the slope, igniting more parched fuels along the way. Despite the heat, a 45-pound pack and little sleep, Bossler felt strong and capable, mopping up the edges of the fire, extinguishing collapsed cactuses that smoldered like burnt rubber. This was her third season as a wildland firefighter, and she was well on her way to fulfilling her goal of becoming an incident commander.

After the fire was contained, Bossler and her crew drove home to Missoula, Montana, concluding a two-week roll in the Southwest. It was early July 2020, the middle of a record-breaking fire season that would burn over 10 million acres across the country, and Bossler was resting before her next assignment. There was a coronavirus outbreak at her partner’s workplace, and just a couple of days after she came home, she caught a debilitating case of COVID-19. Now, more than two years later, the 32-year-old still hasn’t recovered. Long COVID has not only damaged her health, it has also forced her to give up her career in firefighting.

Currently, over 19 million people in the United States—1 in 13 adults—are living with long COVID, though some estimates place the number as high as 23 million. Long COVID is a complex condition that affects all age groups and can involve multiple organ systems. It’s diagnosed weeks or months after a COVID-19 infection. Some of the symptoms include cognitive dysfunction, respiratory and cardiovascular problems and extreme fatigue, though roughly 200 other symptoms are recognized, and some can linger for years. Many patients meet the diagnostic criteria for other diagnoses, as well. Those include postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, which causes extreme dizziness, headaches and rapid heart-rate; and myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME)—sometimes called chronic fatigue syndrome—a disabling neurological disease that has been underfunded for decades.

A World Health Organization official recently warned that repeated infections may increase the risk of long COVID. A recent US Census Bureau survey analyzed by the National Center for Health Statistics showed that as many as 1 in 5 adults who were infected with COVID-19 now have symptoms of long COVID. 

While the number of US wildland firefighters affected is unknown, the workforce is considered at high risk of contracting COVID-19: In 2021, the leading cause of line-of-duty deaths in wildland firefighters was COVID-19. Firefighters are already stretched thin due to the prolonged and intensified fire seasons caused by climate change. Long COVID is not only affecting firefighters’ health and livelihoods, it could also seriously hamper their response to the escalating crisis.

Firefighters are a strikingly transient workforce, making them more vulnerable to catching and spreading COVID-19. “You have firefighters and other fire personnel who are traveling from all over the country to arrive at one common location,” said Matthew Thompson, a research forester with the Forest Service.

The lack of sanitation and privacy in the camps, combined with fatigue, heat, physically demanding work and other factors add to that vulnerability, according to the National Wildfire Coordinating Group (NWCG), which provides leadership to wildland fire operations among federal, state, local, tribal and territorial partners. One of the largest COVID outbreaks at a fire camp occurred during the 2020 Cameron Peak Fire in northern Colorado, with 79 positive cases and 273 close contacts who were quarantined. A Forest Service press officer emailed that among nearly 11,000 permanent and temporary agency firefighters, there were 1,847 reported cases of COVID-19 within the past 12 months. 

In a recent modeling study, Thompson and his co-authors found that social distancing and vaccination reduced outbreaks in fire camps, though their study did not assess long COVID or the highly contagious omicron variant. (According to a 2022 study in the journal Nature Medicine, vaccination may only slightly reduce the risk of long COVID.) Thompson’s study also found that firefighters were infected even more often outside of fire camp than within it, meaning that they are continually at risk as the US eases preventative measures, allowing for dangerous peaks that can occur in the heart of fire season. 

The NWCG recommends COVID safety prevention practices for wildland firefighters based on guidance from the Centers for Disease Control. But a widely referenced CDC document about COVID and wildland firefighters doesn’t specifically mention long COVID.

In a review published last year, Kathleen Navarro, a researcher at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, noted that particulate matter—including the hazardous mixture of small particles and droplets found in wildfire smoke—could contribute to a greater likelihood of COVID-19 infection in wildland firefighters, as well as more severe illness. “It’s not only the risk of transmission or getting COVID,” said Navarro. “It’s also the severity of outcomes.” 

But firefighters face a risk of long COVID, no matter the severity of their acute case: A 2022 white paper stated that nearly 76 percent of those diagnosed with long COVID have not been hospitalized.

Bossler returned to work after her 14-day quarantine despite not feeling fully recovered. “I went back hoping I would go back to normal,” she said. “But I really didn’t. I worked through it because you just don’t pass up opportunities as a female firefighter.” She often felt like she was drowning as she continued to fight fires across Montana the rest of the summer. 

“There’s an attitude in firefighters that you don’t quit for anything,” she said. “And there’s just no education, warning, or recognition of long COVID in fire.” 

Advocates for those with chronic illness warned of the possibility of complex chronic illness following COVID-19 in the beginning of the pandemic, but the federal government’s public health apparatus did not amplify these messages and still doesn’t consistently emphasize the risk of long-term health effects following an initial case. “I can only assume that I did more damage to myself,” she said. “I gave in to this notion that because I was young and healthy, I’d be fine, when I knew, deep down, there was something really wrong with me.”

A growing number of physicians warn that resuming activity while not yet fully recovered may increase a person’s likelihood of developing long COVID. But owing to financial hardship, inadequate sick leave and other pressures, many workers in the United States push on through their illnesses. 

Bossler continued to work on her crew through the summer, despite lingering symptoms. But then, in late August, she found out she was pregnant. She said she likely conceived around the time she first contracted COVID-19 in early July 2020.

In a joint decision with her superiors, Bossler transferred from the engine crew to a timber strike team for the rest of the season. Her due date was in May, and she planned to take a Forest Service office job that summer and resume working as a firefighter the following season—assuming she recovered from long COVID. But these plans were put on hold in January when she gave birth to her daughter, Maesyn, prematurely, at only 25 weeks. Her baby suffered fetal inflammatory response syndrome due to the maternal history of COVID, and Bossler’s placenta was filled with blood clots, which contributed to placental failure and abruption. “A COVID-affected placenta looks like you took a roadkill deer, took the liver out, and shot it with a shotgun a couple of times,” Bossler told me. 

When she first went into the hospital at 23 weeks with contractions from early labor, Bossler was told there was only a 30 percent chance of her baby surviving. Her daughter weighed just 1 pound and 6 ounces at birth when she arrived two weeks later and gained only 5 more pounds during her 115 days in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. She died on May 14, 2021, close to her original due date. In Maesyn’s final moments, Bossler was able to take her daughter out of the NICU to see the sky for the first time. Maesyn died outside in the spring sunlight, in the arms of Bossler and her partner, Marcus Cahoon.

Now, over two years since she first contracted COVID, Bossler continues to experience debilitating long COVID symptoms. She cannot walk more than half a mile without feeling fatigued and also struggles with headaches and memory loss, and has difficulty paying attention. She has chest pain that she says has worsened significantly since she was reinfected in June. Bossler believes her pregnancy complications made her more aware of her illness, which she might otherwise have been too stubborn to acknowledge. “I know of people that have long COVID that are still trying to be firefighters,” she said, “but I don’t think they have the same understanding or recognition of it that I might have. 

“I think all employers of wildland firefighters would be doing a huge disservice to their employees to not recognize long COVID and the mental health challenges that come from it,” Bossler said. When I reached out to the Forest Service in August about the agency’s approach to long COVID education and prevention, I was told to contact the United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which oversees all federal employees. The Interior Department, which employs over 5,000 temporary and permanent wildland fire personnel, wrote that it develops policy based on recommendations from the CDC and Safer Federal Workforce Task Force, which is led by the White House COVID-19 Response Team, the General Services Administration and the OPM—none of which offer publicly available guidelines on long COVID. The Office of Personnel Management sent a written statement in response to our request for comment but did not elaborate on its policies related to long COVID.

“(First responders’) careers depend on our health and us being able to respond to a fire or an emergency at any point of time, despite how we feel,” said Karyn Bishof, the founder of the COVID-19 Longhauler Advocacy Project, a nonprofit advocating for education, research and patient welfare. She said that many first responders, including wildland firefighters, are reluctant to speak about health issues for fear of losing their livelihoods. “The flip side of that is if they’re not seeking treatment and care, they’re not only risking their own lives, but possibly the lives of their crews.”

Bishof became infected with COVID after an outbreak at her firefighter paramedic training in the city of Palm Beach Gardens in South Florida. She told me she was later let go from her job on the Fire Rescue team without explanation. In late 2020, Bishof was also denied workers’ compensation after a doctor diagnosed her symptoms as psychosomatic, a common experience for many patients with complex chronic illness. She has since filed a discrimination lawsuit against the city of Palm Beach Gardens. The city did not respond to my request for comment.

Like other infectious diseases, including Lyme, mononucleosis and SARS-1, COVID-19 can develop into complex chronic illnesses. Researchers have consistently found a range of abnormalities in long COVID patients, including micro clots, persistent viral reservoirs, reactivated viruses and autoimmune responses. The US Department of Health and Human Services has recognized that the condition can be a disability, but in the fall of 2021, Bishof—like many long COVID patients—was denied Social Security disability benefits. She reapplied but was denied a second time and is now awaiting an appeal hearing.

Because there is no cure for long COVID, Bishof said that preventing COVID-19 and increasing public awareness of its long-term consequences are paramount, especially in protecting first responders. She’s concerned that if long COVID continues to affect one of every five infected people, it will inevitably effect public safety. “If we lose that percentage of that workforce, what does that mean for emergency response times?” she asked. “What does that mean for wildfire response?”

In testimony before a Senate Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis this July, Katie Bach, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said that policymakers need to support improved health care, sick leave, disability and workplace accommodations for workers. Given that as many as 4 million long COVID patients are unable to work, Bach estimates a cost of as much as $230 billion in lost earnings alone, not including other costs, such as health care or reduced productivity. 

The Forest Service and Interior Department offer sick leave for employees exposed to communicable diseases, like COVID-19, as well as disability accommodations that can include teleworking and more flexible work hours. Federal firefighters who can’t work at all due to long COVID contracted on the job may be eligible for workers’ compensation, according to an Interior spokesperson. But employees infected outside of work are not eligible for any benefits, according to guidelines by the Office of Personnel Management. 

Looking back at her experience over the past two years, Bossler says the Forest Service needs to develop policies that help protect firefighters from long COVID, as well as provide support for those affected by it. She was forced to leave her job at the Forest Service when she went into early labor. “It was a medically forced resignation,” she said. After her daughter’s birth, she considered returning to the agency, but at that point, she was still grieving and unable to work full-time due to her long COVID symptoms. 

In the fall of 2021, she began working part-time as a health unit coordinator in the same neonatal intensive care unit that treated Maesyn. A number of the nurses there, like other first responders, also suffer from long COVID. “I wanted to work somewhere that would understand me,” Bossler told me. 

“I learned how to handle all these traumatic situations by relying on the lessons from fire,” Bossler said. Maesyn’s brief life and death had such a profound impact that Bossler feels an obligation to continue telling her daughter’s story while educating people about this chronic illness. “I think about other firefighters that lost their ability to do their job.

“It’s not just your job. It’s your identity. The grief that comes with that is just not discussed enough.” 

This story was supported by the journalism nonprofit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

Miles W. Griffis is an independent journalist based in Los Angeles, California. We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

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When Category 4 storm Hurricane Ian hit the southeastern United States in September, it hit with lashing winds, record storm surges, and punishing rain. The storm brought 21.16 inches of rain to Union Park, Florida and was the third worst storm for rainfall since 2005, according to the National Weather Service.

Climate change is making hurricanes like Ian and other storms rainier, and scientists are now starting to quantify just how much. A study published this week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters finds that in recent decades it when it rains in the US, the precipitation falls more fiercely than in decades past. The intensity of rainfall has shifted from lighter periods of rain to more moderate and heavy deluges. The authors looked at the observed rainfall from two time periods (1951–1980 and 1991–2020) across 17 different climate regions within the US from data from the Global Historical Climatology Network.

Between 1991 and 2020, about five percent more precipitation fell when it rained east of the Rocky Mountains, which includes regions like the Midwest and Southeast. By contrast, the study didn’t observe any changes in intensity in the rain over the Rocky Mountains or Pacific Coast.

[Related: Here’s how much climate change intensified 2020’s hyperactive hurricane season.]

“When people study how climate change has affected weather, they often look at extreme weather events like floods, heatwaves and droughts,” Northwestern’s Daniel Horton, the study’s senior author, said in a press release. “For this particular study, we wanted to look at the non-extreme events, which are, by definition, much more common. What we found is pretty simple: When it rains now, it rains more.” 

Previous climate model simulations predicted this increase in rain intensity, especially during weather events like Hurricane Ian. But this new study examined precipitation data across all levels of strength, from quick showers to a big floods. What they found is a “systematic shift in precipitation intensity in many parts of the country,” which shows that there is more water in these storms.

“Not only do we see increasing precipitation intensity for regions east of the Rockies,” Harp said in a press release, “but the intensities are becoming more variable as well, making water resource management even more challenging.”

[Related: The future of hurricanes is full of floods—a lot of them.]

Intensity of both rain and snow had particularly increased in the East, South, and Midwest, but changes in the western United States were not detected. The western US is currently in the grips of a two decade long mega drought.

While this study does not directly point to climate change as the driver of the the changes, the findings are consistent with human-caused global warming and climate model predictions.

“Warmer air holds more moisture,” Harp explained. “For every one degree Celsius the atmosphere warms, it holds 7 percent more water vapor. So these observations are consistent with the predicted effects of human-caused global warming.”

Increased rainfall intensity can leading to crop losses and deadly flooding. Notably, severe rainfall isn’t always caused by major weather systems like a hurricane or blizzard.

“You don’t need an extreme weather event to produce flooding,” Horton said. “Sometimes you just need an intense rainstorm. And, if every time it rains, it rains a little bit more, then the risk of flooding goes up.”

The team hopes that this study will help urban planners design infrastructure that can better withstand powerful precipitation. Techniques like farm pumps to prevent fields from flooding in Bangladesh, planting more urban trees and runoff gardens to absorb excess water, and installing gates and barriers like the ones built into New York City’s subway system after Superstorm Sandy in 2012 can help cities and rural areas alike prepare for increasingly heavy rains.

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Yesterday, Australia’s largest city Sydney beat an annual rainfall record set in 1950 of 86.4 inches (2,194 millimeters). In the first nine months of the year, the area has already seen about 175 percent of the average annual rainfall, according to CNN Meteorologists.

Between early morning and early afternoon 1.07 inches had fallen at Sydney’s Observatory Hill rain gauge. According to Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology, the records at the rain gauge on Observatory Hill date back to 1859.

Sydney and the rest of New South Wales is seeing swollen rivers and moderate-to-major flooding due to the deluge that began on Thursday. More heavy rain is expected to continue across the city and other parts of southeastern Australia, peaking sometime on Saturday.

Earlier this year, Sydney broke a 1942 record for wettest March recorded when 21.8 inches of rain fell. July 2022 was also the rainiest July on record after only two weeks. The month saw 15.9 inches, beating the old 1950 record by about 2 inches.

[Related: Why floods in mountainous regions are getting worse.]

In September, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology declared that a La Niña weather pattern was underway in the Pacific. This type of weather pattern is typically associated with above-average rainfall in eastern Australia. This year is also a rare triple dip La Niña, and meteorologists forecast that the conditions will peak during the Southern Hemisphere’s spring (fall in the United States and the Northern Hemisphere).

La Niña is a natural and cyclical cooling of ocean surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean. The cooling is coupled with changes in the tropical atmospheric circulation, particularly winds, barometric pressure, and rainfall. This cooling doesn’t mean that global-warming is letting up. During La Niña events, trade winds are typically stronger than usual, pushing more warm water toward Asia.

Upwelling increases off the western coast of America, which brings cold, nutrient-rich water up to the surface. The colder surface waters in the Pacific Ocean push the jet stream north, which tends to lead to drought conditions in the southern part of the United States and heavy rains and flooding in the Pacific Northwest and Canada. Winter temperatures are warmer than normal in the South and cooler than normal in the North during a La Niña year, and the weather event can also lead to a more severe hurricane season.

[Related: What is a flash flood?]

El Niño has the opposite effect on global weather patterns: the trade winds weaken and warm water is pushed toward the west coast of the Americas. The Pacific jet stream moves south, giving areas in the northern US and Canada dryer and warmer than usual conditions, and wetter conditions in the Southeast and Gulf Coast.

Right before this triple-dip La Niña began, Australia faced it’s hottest and driest year on record (2019). Drought fueled wildfires destroyed more than 3,000 homes, razed about 47 million acres of land, and directly or indirectly killed more than 400 people. Sydney was choked with wildfire smoke during the Southern Hemisphere summer of 2019-2020, causing increased hospitalizations for those with asthma, cancelled sports practices for kids, and taped windows to keep the smoke out of homes.

Correction (October 16, 2022): The story previously referred to Sydney as the capital city of Australia, which is actually Canberra. It has now been corrected.

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Summer 2022, like the one before it and the one before that and the one before that one, was hot and dry across the Northern Hemisphere. This year, there were water shortages, droughts, wildfires, and crop losses around the world, and they show no signs of stopping. A new report from the World Weather Attribution initiative says that climate change and global warming are making events these severe droughts at least 20 times more likely than they were just a century ago.

Scientists from Switzerland, India, the Netherlands, France, the United States, and the United Kingdom, collaborated on this report to gauge the extent that human-induced climate change has changed both the likelihood and intensity of the low soil moisture, both at the surface and the root zones for most crops. According to the study, this summer’s heatwaves and lack of rain led to very dry soils, particularly in central European countries like France and Germany, as well as mainland China. These deficits in soil moisture led to an increase fire risk, and poor harvests that has led to already high food prices that further threatens food security around the world.

[Related: How climate change fed Pakistan’s devastating floods.]

According to the study, the main driver of these droughts was extreme heat in most of the Northern Hemisphere. They said it would be “virtually impossible” for to see such high average temperatures over such a large area without the influence of greenhouse gas emissions.

“In many of these countries and regions, we are clearly, according to the science, already seeing the fingerprints of climate change,” Maarten van Aalst, the director of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center and one of 21 researchers who prepared the new study, told The New York Times. “The impacts are now very clear to people, and they’re hitting hard,” he added.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), almost half of the lower 48 states experienced moderate to extreme drought in 2022 and parts of the Southwest and California are stuck in a two decade megadrought.

In Europe, record heat began to blanket the continent in May, drying up rivers and causing massive fires. The European Union estimates that heatwaves may have added 11,000 excess deaths in France and 8,000 in Germany.

[Related: The biggest tool we have to fight climate anxiety is community.]

China faced its most brutal summer since modern records began in 1961. The dry and hot weather reduced hydropower output, forcing the country to burn more coal to keep its factories running, emitting more greenhouse gasses.

In September, scientists with World Weather Attribution said that climate change also likely worsened this summer’s devastating floods in Pakistan. The floods have damaged two million homes, submerged about one-third of the country, and caused 1,600 deaths. The initiative geared at doing rapid analysis of weather events also found that global warming had made July’s record-shattering heat wave in Britain hotter and more likely to occur in the future.

One of the report’s most central findings about the planet’s Northern Hemisphere is that because the planet has already warmed by 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.2 Celsius) since the late Nineteenth Century, this summer’s low moisture levels in the first few feet below the soil was at least 20 times as likely to occur compared. This part of the soil is crucial since it’s where the root systems of main plants draw water.

According to Friederike Otto, a scientist at Imperial College London and another one of the study’s authors, natural variations in the weather in Central and Eastern Europe can cancel each other out since it is a smaller area than the Northern Hemisphere above the tropics.

“There is absolutely no doubt that climate change did play a big role here,” Otto said in an interview with The New York Times. But, she continued, “the exact quantification of that role is more uncertain for soil moisture than, for example, when we look at heavy precipitation.”

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Just off of the western coast of Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula lies the 12 mile deep, 6.2 mile wide Chicxulub crater. The 66 million year-old impact crater is the site where a massive asteroid struck the Earth, wiping out the dinosaurs and about three quarters of all life on Earth. But new evidence shows that it was even more destructive than previously realized.

A study published today in the journal AGU Advances shows that the asteroid also triggered a monstrous tsunami with mile-high waves that scoured the ocean floor thousands of miles from the impact site in Mexico. A team of researchers built the a first global simulation of the Chicxulub impact tsunami to be published in a peer-reviewed journal and reviewed the geological record at over 100 sites around the world to determine the tsunami’s path and power.

“This tsunami was strong enough to disturb and erode sediments in ocean basins halfway around the globe, leaving either a gap in the sedimentary records or a jumble of older sediments,” lead author Molly Range, who conducted the modeling study for a master’s thesis at the University of Michigan, said in a press release.

[Related: If that asteroid had been 30 seconds late, dinosaurs might rule the world and humans probably wouldn’t exist.]

The team estimates that the initial energy in the Chicxulub impact tsunami was up to 30,000 times larger than the energy of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake tsunami—a devastating disaster killed more than 230,000 people and was one of the largest tsunamis in the modern record.

To determine just how powerful the tsunami was, the team analyzed the published records of 165 marine boundary sections, or marine sediments in the geologic record deposited around the time the asteroid struck the earth, and sediment cores. The cores act as a terrestrial timeline that scientists can use to analyze the layers or rock, sand, and ice to better understand what the Earth was like millions of years ago.

The K–Pg boundary (also called the K-T boundary) marks around the time where the astroid hits—ending the Cretaceous Period. Through the sediment in these boundary sections, they found that the impact tsunami radiated mainly to the east and northeast (into the North Atlantic Ocean), then later to the southwest through the Central American Seaway which used to separate the continents of North America and South America. Lastly, the tsunami diffused into the South Pacific Ocean.

“The distribution of the erosion and hiatuses that we observed in the uppermost Cretaceous marine sediments are consistent with our model results, which gives us more confidence in the model predictions,” said Range.

The authors also used the boundary section sediment to determine the speed of underwater currents in those basins. In some nearby spots, the current was likely 0.4 miles per hour (20 centimeters per second), a velocity that is strong enough to erode fine-grained sediments on the seafloor. By comparison, the South Atlantic, the North Pacific, the Indian Ocean, and the region that is today the Mediterranean appear to have been largely protected from the strongest effects of the tsunami.

Outcrops of the K-Pg boundary were found on the eastern shores of New Zealand’s north and south islands, over 7,500 miles (12,000 km) from the crater impact site. “We feel these deposits are recording the effects of the impact tsunami, and this is perhaps the most telling confirmation of the global significance of this event,” Range said.

[Related: It was probably springtime when an asteroid did the dinosaurs in.]

To create the computer model of the mass extinction event, a large computer program called a hydrocode simulated the chaotic first 10 minutes of the extinction event. The asteroid in the simulation was modeled after previous studies that found the dinosaur-killing space rock to be 8.7 miles in diameter and moving at 27,000 mph After it struck the Earth’s crust under shallow ocean waters, a 62 mile (100 km) wide crater ejected dense clouds of dust and soot into the atmosphere.

According to the simulation, ejected material formed a 2.8 mile (4.5 km) high wave two and a half minutes after impact which then subsided when the material fell back to Earth. Ten minutes after the projectile hit the Yucatan, a 0.93 mile (1.5 km) high tsunami wave began rolling across the ocean in all directions.

This 10-minute simulation was entered into two tsunami-propagation models (called MOM6 and MOST) used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to track and understand these enormous waves. “The big result here is that two global models with differing formulations gave almost identical results, and the geologic data on complete and incomplete sections are consistent with those results,” University of Michigan paleoceanographer and study co-author Ted Moore said in a press release. “The models and the verification data match nicely.”

The simulation mirrored geologic findings, showing that about one hour after impact, the wave had spread outside the Gulf of Mexico and into the North Atlantic. Four hours after impact, the tsunami passed through the Central American Seaway and into the Pacific, and by the end of day one, the waves had crossed most of the Pacific Ocean and entered the Indian Ocean from both sides. By 48 hours after impact, significant tsunami waves had reached most of the coastlines on Earth.

“Depending on the geometries of the coast and the advancing waves, most coastal regions would be inundated and eroded to some extent,” the authors said. “Any historically documented tsunamis pale in comparison with such global impact.”

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This story has been updated. It was originally published on August 11, 2020.

Among the many hats our smartphones wear, “meteorologist” is one that’s donned frequently. With the tap of a finger, our little pocket computers can make sure we’re never caught without an umbrella or sunscreen as the weather changes.

The best weather apps on Android and iOS will provide all manner of weather forecasts and meteorological data for you, but not all are created equal. Get one or more of these nine on your handset, and you’ll be able to stay on top of weather conditions in your immediate area or anywhere else in the world.

1. AccuWeather

AccuWeather prides itself on the accuracy of its forecasts, and the global weather monitoring company’s free mobile app manages to pack a lot into each screen. It has everything from instant readings on what the weather’s doing now, to more detailed radar scans showing precipitation and clouds over a wider area.

And if you’re looking for up-to-the-minute information on when the skies may open up, it’s got MinuteCast: a circular, clock-like forecasting tool that shows whether or not you can expect precipitation in the next 60 minutes. It’s Dark Sky-esque and worth a look if you’re mourning the loss of that app.

Beyond sunshine and rain, AccuWeather can give details on wind speed, solar ultraviolet radiation (UV) levels, humidity, cloud cover, visibility, and more. It’s undoubtedly one of the best weather apps out there for the depth and precision of its data.

AccuWeather is free for Android and iOS.

2. Weather Underground

Weather Underground offers a bright and intuitive interface, easy access to weather forecasts wherever you need them, and enough other features to put it ahead of most of the weather apps available for your phone.

From telling you how long a current rain shower is going to last, to forecasting the wind speed in your area next week, Weather Underground is packed with useful data and features. These include a radar map, severe weather alerts, ski resort reports, and sunrise and sunset times.

One of the app’s best features is a “smart forecast” tool for running, hiking, or any other outdoor activity. To use it, describe the weather you’d prefer for your excursion (a sunny afternoon, perhaps), and Weather Underground will tell you when that forecast is expected next.

Weather Underground is free for Android and iOS.

3. Carrot Weather

Carrot Weather might be best-suited for those who like their weather forecasts straightforward and honest. It focuses on the basics, but does them well, with attitude—mixing in sarcastic quips and film quotes alongside its weather predictions.

As for the actual meteorological data the app spits out, you can dig in by week, day, or hour, checking out everything from temperatures to wind speed. The graphic at the top of the app screen is particularly useful, showing an at-a-glance representation of the weather for the next few hours.

You can get alerts about upcoming weather patterns and switch between a variety of data sources too, including The Weather Channel and AccuWeather. Overall, Carrot Weather is a good weather app, but if you pick it over some of the others on this list, it’ll be for the entertaining, no-nonsense interface.

Carrot Weather is free for Android and $5 for iOS.

4. The Weather Channel

If you want the experience of watching TV weather on your phone, then the mobile apps from The Weather Channel are perfect. They’ll give you a quick summary of current and upcoming conditions, but you’ll also get a ton of short video forecasts, too.

However you like your weather prediction (either in static or video form), everything is elegantly laid out and easy to get around. So whether you want a quick update on what the weather’s going to do in the next 10 minutes or to take a deep dive into next week’s expected wind speeds and precipitation levels, The Weather Channel has you covered.

We also like the little flashcards that show key data (such as precipitation risk and sunset time) in a rotating carousel. For the sheer number of different ways you can get at weather information, The Weather Channel definitely earns a place on our list of best weather apps.

The Weather Channel is free for Android and iOS.

5. Flowx

Flowx packs a bunch of data into visualizations that manage to be both mesmerizing and, actually, pretty useful. If you want your weather forecast to be as aesthetically pleasing as possible, it’s worth giving Flowx a go.

The app charts important information such as temperatures and precipitation levels in a variety of ways—pick the one you most like the look of—and also features the most detailed radar map we’ve seen so far. Sliding your finger across the screen while looking at the map lets you jump forward and backward in time, too.

It’s not quite as good at near-term forecasts and simple displays of information as some of the other apps we’ve mentioned, but Flowx excels at detailed looks at longer periods of time. There’s no iOS app at the time of writing, but the company is at least thinking about making one.

Flowx is free for Android.

6. Geometric Weather

If you live in the Android ecosystem and value simplicity over vast amounts of data, take a look at Geometric Weather. It’ll give you the basics—the weather now and the hourly, daily, and weekly forecasts—in a pretty, stripped-down interface that won’t overwhelm you.

It can also use the background of your home and/or lock screen to display information at a glance. This feature consists of a clean, dynamic wallpaper with a geometric sun or cloud that changes depending on the forecast, and moves when you tilt your phone. There are no temperature indicators, no icons, no widget clutter—just an appealing illustration to indicate whether or not you’ll need an umbrella.

Geometric Weather is free for Android.

7. Weather on the Way

Certain weather conditions can be dangerous for driving, but many of the best weather apps won’t help you avoid them. Weather on the Way will. When you’re going on a trip, simply plug in a starting location, a destination, and a departure time, and the Apple Maps-powered app will show your route and… ahem… the weather along the way. As you drive, it’ll show your location (if you’ve allowed the app to see where you are).

There’s also a timeline feature, which shows the weather at regular points along your path. Tap any of the forecasts and it’ll show you more detailed data such as humidity, wind speed, visibility, precipitation, and what temperature it feels like outside.

Weather on the Way is free for iOS.

8. RadarScope

If you’re after the most accurate weather app you can get, RadarScope could be the one for you. It has an almost bewildering array of high-resolution radar data for checking forecasts and keeping track of severe weather warnings.

The app describes itself as being “for weather enthusiasts and meteorologists” and has a price tag to match those lofty claims. What you see in this app is actual native radar data sourced from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s “next-generation radar” (NEXRAD) and Terminal Doppler Weather Radar (TDWR) locations in the United States. In other words, it’s the same data professional weather forecasters make use of.

RadarScope is particularly good for tracking and chasing storms across the country, so could be worth the outlay if you’re in a tornado or flash flood hotspot. The learning curve is steeper here than it is with the other apps in this list, but RadarScope rewards the investment.

RadarScope is $10 for Android and iOS.

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Its lights outs for Puerto Rico, again. After dealing with devastation to the electric grid from Hurricane Maria five years ago, the US territory has struggled to create a hurricane-proof way to protect themselves from future blackouts. Now, two weeks after Hurricane Fiona swept over the island, a quarter of Puerto Rico’s residents are still without electricity. While efforts are underway to restore power locally, there’s been a revival of interest in transitioning to renewable energy—from leaders igniting conversations to locals rallying protests. Experts say diversifying the grid will help to “climatize” the energy system, reducing the chances of another island-wide blackout while simultaneously cutting residents’ carbon footprint and energy costs.

“We had a very fragile grid before the hurricane, and we hadn’t made the long-term repairs that needed to be made,” explains Sergio Marxuach, the policy director and general counsel at the Center for a New Economy in Puerto Rico. “But it’s old technology, and eventually the entire world needs to move to renewables due to climate change.”

In 2019, Puerto Rico passed a climate law mandating 100 percent of the island’s electricity come from renewable sources like solar and wind-powered facilities by 2050. While that’s still decades away, the territory has struggled to ramp up renewable energy use and phase out fossil fuel. Fossil fuels currently make up 97 percent of Puerto Rico’s electricity. In 2021, natural gas made up 44 percent of the total energy followed by petroleum at 37 percent. Benchmarks towards the 2050 plan include becoming 50 percent renewable by the end of the current decade, but the number is currently only at two to three percent, according to Max Lainfiesta, a manager at the Rocky Mountain Institute’s (RMI) Islands Energy Program.

[Related: Hurricane Fiona leaves most of Puerto Rico without power]

There are several short- and long-term routes Puerto Rico can take to reach its renewable energy goal. Marxuach says that right now Puerto Rico has an island-wide interconnected grid, but that current structure has a significant weak point. “If one part of the grid goes down, everything else shuts down because of the way [they] built the system to protect itself,” he explains. Creating seven to eight regional grids stationed across the island would not only prevent future disruptions to infrastructure, but would also slowly introduce renewable energy to areas and create locally sourced power. This segmented system can boost larger infrastructure, but also function independently when there is a hurricane or other disastrous event.

However, Marxuach acknowledges there are some challenges to creating an interconnected energy grid. For one, there’s been debate on how much renewable energy can be incorporated to the island right now, and whether Puerto Rico has the energy storage technology to overturn the entire system. Another issue is the geography of the island. He says that even though Puerto Rico is only 3,515 square miles—three times the size of Rhode Island but smaller than Connecticut—there are mountains and isolated communities that could make it difficult to establish new transmission lines for regional grids. 

What’s more, Marxuach says the US government has already approved $12 billion dollars to get the renewables transition underway in the territory, but bureaucracy from federal agencies such as FEMA and the Department of Energy had slowed down efforts to start using the funds before the hurricane. “Ironically, the new hurricane gave us a window to start a new reconstruction process to deal with the damage caused by Fiona and get moving on the grid,” he notes. “There are things we can do by next year to be better prepared, but the real modernization and phasing out natural gas will take more than five to eight years.”

[Related: You’ll need to solve Puerto Rico’s debt crisis to win this new board game]

Lainfiesta points out that because of the unreliability in the grid, residents have taken matters into their own hands and have invested in solar-plus battery systems for their homes. But from his perspective, these can get very expensive and further deepen the gap between higher- and lower-income neighborhoods on the island. People in middle- and lower-class neighborhoods cannot afford to pay for expensive installations and are usually the last to be reconnected after a power outage. The RMI team’s approach to “climatizing” Puerto Rico is to prioritize critical facilities—areas whose services are necessary for the community—first. Called the Community Energy Resilience Initiative, Lainfiesta and his collaborators help finance solar and storage microgrids for places such as pharmacies, grocery stores, and gas stations, so that in an event of another blackout, people have a way to buy food and water, charge their phone, and get their medicine.

“In Puerto Rico, everyone is talking about electricity, because people have been suffering from poor [utility] service all the time,” Lainfiesta explains. Costs are topping 30 cents per kilowatt hour (the average in the US is about 12 cents per kilowatt hour) for an unreliable grid, “and the most vulnerable population are mostly the ones paying for it,” he adds. The silver lining is that the recent hurricanes have motivated people in Puerto Rico, and possibly others worldwide, to talk and make real efforts to adopt renewable energy.

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After pummeling the southeast coast of Florida at a maximum of 150 mph sustained winds, Hurricane Ian is working its way up the Atlantic and showing signs of a resurgence. The record-setting storm is set to reach South Carolina by this afternoon.

Ian first made landfall in Cuba on September 27, taking out the entire island’s power grid (which is still not fully restored). It then barreled over the Gulf of Mexico, gathering speed and power from the abnormally warm waters, and was upgraded to a Category 4 hurricane before it breached Florida on September 28. So far, 12 deaths have been reported in the state, and several parts of Lee County have been utterly demolished. The number of mortalities in the area could rise as emergency officials continue search and rescue.

From the Florida coast, Ian crossed over to the Atlantic seaboard, where it’s slowly been moving north as a tropical storm. Yesterday, the National Hurricane Center upgraded it to Category 1 again. It is next expected to make landfall between Savannah, Georgia, and Charleston, South Carolina, today around 2 p.m. Eastern.

[Related: What hurricane categories mean.]

“Life-threatening storm surge and hurricane conditions expected along the Carolina coast this afternoon. Flooding rains likely across the Carolinas and southern Virginia,” stated the National Hurricane Center in its most recent advisory. The governor of South Carolina has declared a state of emergency, but hasn’t issued a mandatory evacuation order or school closures.

While the impact this weekend should not be as devastating as that in south Florida (which experienced a rare “500-year” flood event), Carolinians should take shelter and prepare for potential disaster conditions. Precipitation from the hurricane’s remnants could be seen up the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast as well.

[Related: Rare ‘triple dip’ La Niña predicted for 2022.]

Though Ian never reached Category 5 status, its rapid intensification over the Gulf of Mexico made it particularly nasty for Cuba and Florida. This is likely linked to warmer seas and moister air caused by climate change, Vox reported. A quiet hurricane season also left the region’s waters in prime state for feeding a massive system. “We haven’t had another storm yet this season to go through and cool off the Gulf through that mechanism. There’s this pristine Gulf of Mexico from a sea-surface temperature standpoint, and Hurricane Ian has been able to exploit that,” Paul Miller, a professor of oceanography and coastal sciences at Louisiana State University, told Vox.

Ian might not be the last of the year’s major disasters: Hurricane season extends to the end of November in North America, and several weather forecasting agencies have predicted that there will be an above-average number of named storms. Not all will make landfall.

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All eyes are set on Florida as Hurricane Ian, a historic Category 4 storm, wrecks havoc on the state’s Gulf Coast. The storm officially made landfall at 3:05 p.m EST on Wednesday near barrier island Cayo Casto with winds maximum sustained winds of 150 mph, only seven miles per hour below a Category 5 definition. Ian is one of the strongest hurricanes to ever hit the United States.

About 2 million customers in Florida were without power as of this morning, according to PowerOutage.us.

Massive storm surges, the rise in ocean water above typically dry land, hit Fort Meyers hours before the storm’s official landfall. Water rushed into parking garages and power lines burst into flames south of the eyewall in nearby Naples. The storm surge likely peaked as high as 12 feet in some areas of the state according to government officials. In Fort Meyers, the surge increased to over seven feet, four feet higher than the previous storm surge record and making it the largest in the city’s 50 years of storm observations. In Naples, the tide gauge also posted its highest level on record, with a surge of at least seven feet.

Roughly 2.5 million people are under evacuation. Tampa International Orlando International Airport closed ahead of the storm and Jacksonville International Airport cancelled all of today’s flights.

[Related: Forecasters warn Floridians to prepare for rapidly intensifying Hurricane Ian.]

On Tuesday, the storm made landfall in western Cuba, as a powerful Category 3 storm with winds up to 125 miles per hour. Into Wednesday, the storm dumped several inches of rain. Two deaths have been reported across Cuba. At one point, the power was out for the entire island, but Cuban authorities began the slow process of restoring power on Wednesday.

The rainfall triggered mudslides and flash flooding in the western part of the Caribbean island, where thousands of residents evacuated. Images from Cuban media outlet Cubadebate show the Pinar del Rio province with raging floodwaters and uprooted trees. The province is known for growing Cuba’s rich tobacco, and the owners of the Robaina tobacco farm posted photos on social media showing greenhouses and roofs destroyed. “It was apocalyptic. A real disaster,” farm owner Hirochi Robaina wrote on Facebook.

[Related: What hurricane categories mean and why we use them.]

Ian has since been downgraded to a tropical storm is anticipated to head north and east towards Georgia and the Carolinas later today. According to the National Hurricane Center, it may come ashore near Charleston, South Carolina as a strong tropical storm with 60 mph winds and huge amounts of rain. Tropical storm warnings and storm surge watches are in place, as well as some hurricane watches. There is the possibility that Ian could be close to hurricane strength when it comes ashore again.

Ian is the fifth named storm of the 2022 Atlantic Hurricane Season which officially ends on November 30th. In May, NOAA forecasted an above-normal hurricane season, because of continuing La Niña weather pattern and higher than normal Atlantic Ocean temperatures due to climate change. The hurricane was able to gain strength over abnormally warm water in the Gulf of Mexico. Global warming has increased average ocean temperatures around the world, with some parts of the Gulf seeing record high temperatures as high as 90 degrees Fahrenheit this summer. Hurricanes need waters about 80 degrees Fahrenheit to strengthen, so this abnormally warm water is creating more hurricane fuel.

Research also shows that hurricanes are also moving more slowly, which gives them more time to cause more damage, especially in the form of flooding.

According to Colorado State University researcher Philip Klotzbach, only four hurricanes on record have made landfall in the US with maximum sustained winds of greater than 155 mph, while a total of 14 Category 4 or 5 hurricanes have made landfall in Florida since the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) began keeping records in 1851. Hurricane Charley was referenced by government officials as an example of how hurricane tracks can change to prepare for Ian. The Category 4 storm hit in 2014 and was originally forecasted to hit the Tampa Bay area directly, but shifted closer to the southwest.

The strongest and most powerful hurricane to hit southern Florida was Hurricane Andrew in 1992. The storm struck southern Florida with 165 mph winds, caused roughly $26 billion in damage, and caused 23 deaths.

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This story was originally published on September 7, 2017.

Before Ian, or Maria, or Katrina, there was Camille. With winds so powerful that they knocked out wind gauges in Mississippi, the epic strength of Hurricane Camille was monstrous. But before it struck the Gulf coast on August 17, 1969, Robert Simpson, the director of the National Hurricane Center, made the executive decision to warn residents in the path of the giant storm of high winds, low barometric pressure, and a storm surge of between 15 and 20 feet.

Reports about the event many years later all agree that the decision to get so specific was unprecedented. In doing so, Simpson bucked tradition at the National Weather Service’s precursor, the United States Weather Bureau, which typically gave people living in the path of a hurricane generic warnings instead of granular details of storm surge or wind speed.

[Related: NOAA is changing the way it talks about hurricanes]

The decision to give people more information paid off. More people got out of the way of the storm, and Simpson was on the lookout for ways to communicate the dangers of storms more clearly. Around the same time, an engineer named Herbert Saffir was trying to figure out a way to quantify hurricane damage for the United Nations, and found that wind damage above 75 miles per hour wasn’t well categorized.

Saffir came up with a scale of structural damage due to destructive hurricane winds for his work at the UN, which Simpson found as he was pondering better communication options in the aftermath of Camille. Simpson was looking for a better way to communicate how dangerous hurricanes were to first responders, relief organizations, and the public.

Enter the Saffir-Simpson scale. Ranging from Category 1 (the weakest hurricanes) to Category 5 (the strongest hurricanes), the scale originally used storm surge and wind speed to categorize the potential destructiveness of a hurricane. Simpson and Saffir figured that a simple scale divided into five sections would be easy enough for the public to understand. For the most part, they were right. We’re comfortable knowing that a Category 3 hurricane is serious, and a Category 5 storm is really intense, even if we might not be comfortable writing out a definition for those categories.

But the scale was still just an estimate. As time went on, researchers began to notice that the storm surge in a Category 2 storm could be much larger than a storm surge in a Category 4 Storm, leading to deadly flooding. The scale didn’t take the area the storm covered into account, and was confusing the public. So, in 2010, researchers adjusted the scale to only include the sustained wind speed—not gusts, which are brief, faster bursts of wind—and renamed it the Saffir-Simpson Wind Scale. In 2012, another minor tweak to the scale adjusted the limits to account for confusion when translating between miles per hour and kilometers per hour.

At present the scale is as follows (paraphrased from the National Hurricane Center):

• Category 1 74-95 mph—Damage to roofs, siding, gutters, large branches and some trees with shallow roots. Power outages could last days.
• Category 2 96-110 mph—Major roof damage, and downed trees will likely block roads. Power loss from days to weeks.
• Category 3 111-129 mph—Even more severe roof damage and blocked roads. Electricity and water expected to be out for days or weeks.
• Category 4 130-156 mph—Most of the roof could be ripped off, along with some exterior walls. Trees and power lines will go down, blocking off communities from aid. Power loss will last from weeks to months.
• Category 5 157 mph or higher—Walls and roofs could both collapse in the wind, destroying homes. In addition to isolating communities, infrastructure like power could take months to come back online.

It’s unlike that Category 6 will be added to the current scale. But that doesn’t mean that other scales aren’t in development. Researchers are still trying to figure out the best ways to communicate the dangers of hurricane to the people in harm’s way. The current scale still doesn’t take into account the size or forward motion of a storm, and at present it doesn’t take storm surge into account either (though the National Hurricane Center does include storm surge warnings in its advisories).

James Done, a project scientist at The National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, is figuring out another way of assessing the destructiveness of storms. The project he’s working on, the Cyclone Damage Potential Index, was developed in partnership with the reinsurance industry—the people who insure insurers. It considers the size of the storm and its forward speed to calculate out how destructive a storm could be.

“It measures the potential destructive power of the hurricane, but it doesn’t give you the actual damage,” Done says.

[Related: Hurricane category ratings can be misleading]

That’s because damage depends on houses, buildings, and infrastructure being in the path of a hurricane. If a storm with massive damage potential makes landfall on an uninhabited coast, there’s not going to be much destruction. Just like real estate agents always told you: location matters.

The index ranks storms from 1 to 10, and was able to predict that Harvey would be disastrous to Houston. It looks at the potential damage that a storm could do to buildings on land or offshore structures like oil rigs. But don’t go trying to translate the Saffir-Simpson Wind Scale to the new index just yet.

While the index has been making the rounds in research and industry circles for a few years, it’s still under development, and hasn’t been incorporated into official warnings. And that’s ok, says Done.

“The Saffir-Simpson is a superb communication tool. A lot of people make their evacuation decisions based on what Category the hurricane is going to be, and there’s a lot of inertia we need to take into account if we’re considering changing such a scale,” Done says. “I think it’s dangerous to suggest we should replace Saffir-Simpson with something else.”

Instead, he suggests adding additional measures of a hurricane’s destructiveness, like the cyclone’s potential damage, to the toolkit that already exists for the people on the front lines of storm prediction and response.

The Saffir-Simpson scale has been the primary tool in that box for years, and even though it’s evolved, it’s not going to disappear any time soon. But now we’ve got more tools at our disposal. As we face down some of the strongest storms we’ve ever seen, knowledge is always power.

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Weeks before we even think about getting sandbags or boarding up windows to prevent hurricane damage, an underwater evacuation begins. Sharks, sea snakes, and other wildlife will make preparations to escape becoming trapped or hurt as massive storms approach a coast. 

Much of Florida’s aquatic life—including species as diverse as manatees and alligators—know what to do in a storm like Hurricane Ian. After all, these native animals have had millions more years of practice than us. But those age-old skills will only become more useful as hurricanes become more intense from climate change. 

“Aquatic animals respond to storms for the same reason we do—to avoid injury, death, and the destruction from hurricanes,” says Bradley Strickland, a postdoctoral researcher who studies aquatic animal response to hurricanes and climate change at William and Mary’s Virginia Institute of Marine Science. Still, some animals are better equipped to weather or evade the storms than others. And sharks are among the best. 

[Related: Sharks are learning to love coastal cities]

Even when a hurricane is far on the horizon, the atmosphere changes: the barometric pressure drops. “From two weeks out of a hurricane, sharks can actually detect the change and start heading for deeper water,” says Neil Hammerschlag, director of the shark research and conservation program at the University of Miami. The air around Hurricane Ian has gradually been decreasing in pressure as the storm strengthens, and sharks can sense that, allowing them to flee long before Florida’s human residents were given mandatory evacuation orders. 

“Similar to the way we use meteorological technologies and observations about the changing wind and temperature before a storm, aquatic animals have ways to sense the approach of a storm,” Strickland says. Sharks use their sensitive inner ears to detect a gathering storm’s pressure changes, he adds. And, because of their incredible swimming abilities (some can swim up to 45 miles per hour), they can quickly escape oncoming storms—that is, if they choose to. 

Smaller shark species and juveniles opt to escape to deeper water to avoid the turbulence near the shore. For them, “staying in shallow water would be like a shark tornado,” Hammerschlag says, because hurricanes can push currents up to 300 feet below the ocean’s surface. For smaller sharks that remain in the shallows, they risk being swept inland.

Yet other larger predators, like tiger sharks that grow up to 14 feet and 1,400 pounds, view hurricanes as an opportunity for the ultimate sea smorgasbord. By tracking tiger sharks during and after Hurricane Irma, Hammerschlag noticed that “not only did they not run away, but they may have been taking advantage of the things that were dying, either birds that got washed into the water or fish and invertebrates that collided with debris.” After the storm, he adds, there were “higher numbers of tiger sharks in the area for about two weeks.”

For aquatic and semi-aquatic animals that can’t ride out the storm or swim beyond its reach, finding shelter may be the superior option for survival. “Sea snakes will seek refuge in volcanic rocks to avoid typhoons,” Strickland says. “Alligators likely hunker down to weather a storm by finding easy to get in and out of places,” he adds. Some smaller gators may get swept away by hurricanes; others might change their foraging patterns altogether to stay safe. 

Other species may be less lucky. The graceful manatee, for example, has been found in particularly sticky situations post-hurricane. Although weight-wise they are comparable to a tiger shark, speed-wise they are definitely not, cruising up to 15 mph only if they really push it. And try as they might to hunker down before a storm, this doesn’t always work out for them. Instead, they may get swept out of coastal waters by floods. Others, curious to explore new streams, have been found stuck in smaller ponds, forests, or even by roads after post-storm swims through flooded areas. Yet hurricanes rank low on the dangers to manatees, a threatened keystone species in Florida often imperiled by watercraft.

Even if Hurricane Ian is the first big tempest that a Floridian animal will experience, the odds are good it will take some kind of action. “We see animals evacuating the places they call home in advance of a major storm despite, in some cases, having never experienced a hurricane within their lifetime,” Strickland says. “This shows just how innate it is to protect yourself from a storm by preparing or fleeing compared to just waiting it out.”

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Hurricane watches have been issued in Florida and officials are urging residents to prepare for the worst ahead of Hurricane Ian. As of this morning, the fifth hurricane of the 2022 Atlantic hurricane season is a Category 1 with sustained winds of 75 mph. It is sitting about 90 miles west southwest of Grand Cayman Island and 275 miles southeast of the western tip of Cuba, according to the National Hurricane Center (NHC).

Hurricane warnings are in effect in western Cuba, where the storm is likely to hit from this afternoon into tomorrow.

Ian is set to rapidly intensify over the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico and could reach Category 4 strength as early as this afternoon. It is currently forecast to make landfall on either the western coast of Florida or the Florida Panhandle by midday Thursday, but uncertainty remains about the hurricanes track and intensity. A state of emergency has been declared for the entire state and storm conditions are “projected to constitute a major disaster.”

[Related: Dangerous hurricanes come in all shapes and sizes (literally).]

The NHC wanted that, “considerable flooding impacts are possible mid-to-late week in central Florida given already saturated antecedent conditions, and flash and urban flooding is possible with rainfall across the Florida Keys and the Florida peninsula through mid-week.”

Forecasters also caution that there is a high likelihood of the storm strengthening into a major hurricane, bringing with it massive storm surge. Last week, the storm’s strength and ability to stay organized was hindered by persistent wind shear. These shears can limit strength of tropical systems like Ian, but intense thunderstorms now developing around the Ian’s center, are a sign that the storm is intensifying. The conditions are also set to be extremely favorable for strengthening, as the storm moves into the warm waters of the western Caribbean.

[Related: Slow, meandering hurricanes are often more dangerous—and they’re getting more common.]

“A quick uptick in strengthening is expected early this week as Ian moves into the western Caribbean, where low wind shear and very warm water are in place. This will raise the likelihood of significant impacts in the western Caribbean, and eventually the United States,” explained AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Adam Douty. “By Tuesday, Ian may be a dangerous major hurricane.”

The Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale only uses wind speeds to categorize a hurricane’s strength, so just because a storm is low on this scale, doesn’t mean it can’t be destructive. Last week, Hurricane Fiona was a Category 1 storm when it slammed into Puerto Rico, leaving the entire island without power and causing devastating floods. Fiona wasn’t even a hurricane by this measurement when it battered Canada this weekend, sweeping houses into the ocean. A landmark study published in 2019 showed that water is more deadly than winds during tropical cyclones and climate change has caused hurricanes to become stronger worldwide over the past 40 years.

Hurricane Ian follows a long list of “I” named storms that have broken history or even had their names been retired. A name is retired by the World MeteorologicalOrganization (WMO) if the storm’s impacts were particularly destructive and/or deadly. Since 1954, 12 “I” storms have been retired , with 10 of them occurring since 2001 alone, and the most recent being 2021’s Hurricane Ida. The Category 4 storm killed an estimated 100 people and caused roughly $75 billion in damage from the Caribbean up to New England.

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Over the next two months, hundreds of millions of birds will fly down the continental US on their way to winter nesting grounds. Some fall migrants will journey the length of Mexico, while others will cross the Gulf of Mexico to reach South America.

For the most part, birds take on their migration at night, nearly invisible far up in the air. But BirdCast, real-time software produced by ornithologists at Colorado State University and Cornell University, takes the nocturnal passage of those animals and turns it into maps that can guide you through the seasonal spectacle.

[Related: These new interactive maps reveal the incredible journeys of migrating birds]

Birdcast uses a combination of radar from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration  weather stations—which detects bats, birds, and mayfly hatches, in addition to clods—and federal weather forecasts to predict migration hotspots. “Songbirds in general move in really broad fronts,” says Kyle Horton, an ornithologist at Colorado State University and one of the programs developers. Radar can spot individual flocks as they flap away from a roost, but from a continent-wide perspective, “you will see birds lifting off the landscape basically everywhere except big bodies of water.”

By pairing data on which conditions have favored migrations in previous seasons, BirdCast shows the swathes of North America where wind, rain, and temperature have made it possible for millions of birds to head south together all at once.

How it tracks birds

BirdCast offers both a retrospective on past fall and spring migrations and rapidly updated tools that look into the future.

The live map gives you a night-by-night view of how many birds were in the air across the country and where they were headed, stretching back to the spring of 2018. (Brighter and warmer colors mean more birds.) It also lets you compare a specific date to nocturnal flights from earlier years, and points out when your region is experiencing peak migration.

To see what’s in store, BirdCast’s developers recommend that you start with their three-day forecast maps. These offer a nationwide view of predicted migration hotspots—where birds will take off a few hours after sunset—over the next 72 hours.

“Being able to say however many millions of birds went over your state last night is a pretty cool thing,” says Mikko Jimenez, a PhD student in Horton’s lab. This isn’t just useful for ornithologists or birders, but helps explain migrations to everyday people: Recently, the Fox 10 news station in Phoenix used BirdCast data to depict migrations alongside its weather forecast.

After that, you can zoom in on your state or county on the Migration Dashboard. This tool shows how many birds crossed a county the previous night, based on radar readings, and how many there were in the air at the night’s most crowded moment. And if you’re interested in knowing exactly which species might be traveling through, the dashboard is integrated with Cornell’s eBird database, which reveals common avian sightings from the same time in previous years.

How it helps save birds

Jimenez, whose research focuses on how BirdCast can help protect migrating flocks, says the data is being used by conservation groups to direct campaigns that aim to reduce light pollution that hurts birds. Night-flying birds are easily confused by artificial light, especially from glass buildings, which can kill thousands of songbirds in a single night.

“You can focus ‘lights out’ campaigns on those big nights of migration, which I think is a huge game changer,” Jimenez says. BirdCast has formed partnerships with local nonprofits across the country, like Lights Out Texas, which convinced dozens of buildings in Dallas, Houston, and Fort Worth to turn off lights on key nights.

And while skyscrapers and other big reflective buildings present the most significant dangers to migrating birds, recent research suggests that turning off even some small fixtures measurably decreases the number of dead animals. If BirdCast indicates a heavy migration night in your area, you can help by, say, turning off your outdoor lights. “Individual action really does matter at a local scale,” Jimenez says.

“Light pollution is a simple fix, and if we change tonight, we’d have an immediate impact,” Horton says.

How to see bird migration up close

BirdCast can help you experience the thrills of fall and spring migration, Jimenez says, whether you’re a birder or not.

Just because birds mostly migrate at night doesn’t mean they’re impossible to spot. “I could be on my roof in Brooklyn … and literally hear birds migrating overhead,” Jimenez says. Think of it like an avian meteor shower, except you’re listening for the soft, high-pitched chirps flocks make as they pass overhead.

[Related: How to start birding in any US city]

“You can also see the aftermath of that if you go out to your local park,” where the birds might stop over before taking off again the next evening, Jimenez says. “You can almost feel that it’s birdier.”

The maps can also show that migrating birds are probably relying on more habitats around you than expected. “I think migration is such a cool conservation topic, because a lot of conservation issues are far from home,” Jimenez explains. “This is one that’s literally flying over your house, over cities, over rural areas. Everyone weirdly plays a part.”

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After battering the Caribbean and Bermuda, Hurricane Fiona is heading for a landfall in northeastern Canada this weekend. The storm has already claimed the lives of at least eight people and shut off power for millions earlier this week.

According to the National Hurricane Center, Fiona was a powerful Category 3 storm with sustained winds of 125 miles per hour (gusting to 155 mph) located about 125 miles north of the island Bermuda as of this morning. It is expected to make landfall early Saturday morning as a hurricane-strength post-tropical storm.

Officials in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island are urging those in the path of the deadly storm to prepare for high winds, heavy rains, storm surge, and high winds and to be on high alert.

“Fiona is projected to be a significant and historical weather event for Nova Scotia,” said John Lohr, the minister responsible for Nova Scotia’s Emergency Management Office. “It has the potential to be very dangerous. Impacts are projected to be felt across the province. Every Nova Scotian should be preparing today,” added Lohr in an official update yesterday.

[Related: Hurricane Fiona leaves most of Puerto Rico without power.]

Provincial emergency officials have also encouraged residents to secure outdoor items, trim trees, charge cell phones, and create a 72-hour emergency kit. Winds could reach 100 mph (160 kph) when Fiona makes landfall on Nova Scotia tomorrow morning.

This region hasn’t seen a storm this intense for about 50 years, according to Chris Fogarty, manager for Canadian Hurricane Centre. In yesterday’s briefing, Fogarty warned that, “This could be Canada’s version of (Hurricane) Sandy.” Fogarty was referring to Fiona’s size and intensity and the deadly combination of both hurricane and winter-storm characteristics. Almost a decade ago, Hurricane Sandy affected all of the eastern seaboard and caused roughly $78.7 billion in damage.

Hurricane warnings are in place from Hubbards to Brule in Nova Scotia and from Parson’s Pond to Francois in Newfoundland. Prince Edward Island and Isle-de-la-Madeleine are also under warnings, where Prince Edward Island officials are asking residents to similarly prepare, especially for storm surge.

[Related: Predicting a hurricane’s intensity is only going to get harder.]

“Storm surge is certainly going to be significant … Flooding that we have not seen nor can we measure against,” said Tanya Mullally, Prince Edward Island’s head of emergency management in an update yesterday. Mullally also added that the northern part of the island is expected to face the worst of the storm due to the direction of its winds.

Hurricanes typically lose their main source of energy (warm water) as they hit colder waters, making them fairly rare, but not unheard of in Atlantic Canada. In 2003, Hurricane Juan resulted in multiple deaths and heavily affected parts of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island with power outages, major tree damage, and record coastal water levels. The North Atlantic is home to some of the most rapidly warming waters in the world, due to climate change.

Hurricane Fiona upended critical electricity and water infrastructure for millions of people across Puerto Rico, when it slammed into the island on Sunday. According to the island’s main power company LUMA Energy, only 38 percent of customers had their power restored as of yesterday. The mass power outage is leaving millions without air conditioning or fans, as Puerto Rico endures extreme heat that felt as hot as 112 degrees Fahrenheit yesterday.

It continued to wreck havoc as it strengthened and hit the Dominican Republic and Turks and Caicos. “This was something incredible that we’ve never seen before,” said Higüey, Dominican Republic resident Ramona Santana in an interview with CNN en Español. “We’re in the streets with nothing, no food, no shoes, clothes, just what’s on your back. … We don’t have anything. We have God, and the hope help will come.”

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While much of Puerto Rico was in the dark due to Hurricane Fiona and surges of water from Typhoon Merbok inundated buildings in western Alaska, Japan faced its own major storm.

Typhoon Nanmadol made landfall near Kagoshima city on Sunday evening with winds of 110 miles per hour, the equivalent of a strong Category 2 hurricane. According to The Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA), its central pressure was 935 millibars at landfall, making it the fourth-strongest typhoon on record to make landfall in Japan since the agency began collecting the data in 1951.

The storm roared onto the main island of Honshu on Monday morning. Nanmadol began to weaken as it moved over land yesterday, but still brought heavy rains. By Monday evening, parts of Kyushu, Shikoku island, and the region of Chugoku experienced rainfall over seven inches in 24 hours. Shikoku’s Yanase saw more than 15 inches of rain.

According to Yale Climate Connections, the southern main island of Kyushu saw the heaviest rainfall, where observations showed five separate weather stations picked up 19.69 inches of rain in 24 hours on Sunday. Millions of people in southern and western Japan were asked to evacuate their homes before the typhoon hit and over 300,000 households across southwestern Japan were left without power.

Bullet trains and airlines suspended service, while store chains and delivery services temporarily shuttered in southwestern Japan. Around 130,000 homes in the region remain without power as of this morning.

[Related: This typhoon-resistant facility in Guam will power the tubes that give us the internet.]

According to reporting from Reuters, at least two people have died in the storm and dozens of other injuries have been reported. Close to 20,000 people rode out the storm on Sunday night in shelters in Kyushu’s Kagoshima and Miyazaki prefectures, where the JMA has issued a rare “special warning.” This is an alert that is issued only when it forecasts conditions seen once in several decades.

Today, Tokyo is forecast to experience up to 6 inches of rain, possibly at a rate of 2 inches per hour.

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida postponed leaving for the United Nations General Assembly in New York this week to assess the damage. “I postponed my scheduled departure from today to take stock of the damage caused by the typhoon and to take all possible measures for recovery,” Kishida told reporters on Monday evening. This morning, Kishida left for New York.

[Related: Proof Of Japan’s Kamikaze Typhoons Found In Ancient Rocks.]

The latest forecast has Nanmadol just offshore the Tottori prefecture in the Sea of Japan. Its sustained winds have fallen to 63 MPH and the storm is not expected to strengthen. It is expected to make another landfall as a weaker storm in mainland Japan, but heavy rainfall is still expected, before the storm turns out to sea tomorrow.

While typhoons can form all year in Japan, typhoon season typically peaks from July to October. Nanmadol is the 14th typhoon Japan has experienced in 2022 and follows record setting heatwaves in June. The heat caused millions of residents of Tokyo to lose power and several cases of heatstroke.

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The remnants of Typhoon Merbok have brought high winds, storm surges, and drenching rains to the western coast of Alaska since hitting the region on Saturday. Now regarded as one of the worst storms the region has seen in decades, the flooding lifted buildings off of their foundations and left communities completely underwater. According to the National Weather Service (NWS) on Saturday, the storm was producing the highest water levels in over 50 years.

The New York Times reports that in the village of Golovin (50 miles east of Nome, the finishing line of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race), up to a dozen of the 48 houses had been inundated with water. In Newtok, located 250 miles south of Golovin, a third of the population of about 200 sheltered in a school building. Tribal Chief Edgar Tall of Hooper Bay told Alaska Public Media News that he’s “never seen a storm like this” in the state. At least three houses in the Hooper Bay area were lifted from their foundations with 110 people sheltering at a schoolhouse as the water rose.

[Related: A super typhoon of historic proportions just cut thousands of U.S. citizens off from the world.]

According to Rick Thoman, a climate specialist at the International Arctic Research Center, many small and primarily Indigenous communities along the western Alaskan coast coast will face unique challenges as they do their best to recover from the recover from the damage before winter arrives. “All of these communities, there’s basically no road connections to any of them,” Thoman told The Washington Post. “It’s a very different setup than anywhere in the Lower 48.”

Governor Mike Dunleavy declared a disaster for impacted communities on Saturday. “The storm hitting the coastal regions of western Alaska is unprecedented,” he said in the statement, “and I want every Alaskan impacted by the storm to know that the State is working around the clock to protect Alaskans, and once the storm passes, to rebuild essential infrastructure and make our coastal communities whole again.”

By Saturday night, the governor’s office reported impacts to roads, oil storage and possibly sea walls. They are still assessing whether the storm affected water supplies and sewage systems in the state’s western towns.

Floodwaters have begun to recede, but it may be days before officials at Alaska’s Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management (DHSEM) know the full extent of the damage. The affected areas span well over 1,000 miles of coastline. According to DHSEM public information officer Jeremy Zidek, it includes “some of the most remote areas of the United States” that are large, difficult to access, and likely to face a variety of levels of damage.

[Related: Hurricane forecasts can be confusing—here’s a helpful glossary.]

National Weather Service was able to send out warnings by at least September 15th and notify the communities in the storm’s path. “Local and tribal governments activated their emergency response plans and did what was necessary to protect their community members,” Bryan Fisher, Director of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, said in a statement. “These steps have been instrumental in preventing injury and loss of life and have minimized damage to property.”

Typhoon Merbok formed over the northwestern Pacific during the second week of September and transitioned to a powerful wind and rainstorm over the Bering Sea. It transitioned into an extratropical cyclone, feeding off jet stream energy, while swirling over an area of unusually warm water again due to climate change. The waters warmed by climate change added even more energy to the storm as it surged northward into the Bering Sea. This is an unusual path for storms at this time of year, as most move into the Gulf of Alaska. The storm is considered now the most intense storm on record in the Bering Sea for September, and one of the strongest ever recorded.

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An eerily quiet 2022 Atlantic Hurricane Season began to show its might yesterday, when Hurricane Fiona, a a Category 1 storm, with winds 85 miles per hour, slammed into Puerto Rico. According to the National Hurricane Center, the storm made landfall around 3:20 p.m. EST on Sunday near Punta Tocon.

“The damages that we are seeing are catastrophic,” said Governor Pedro Pierluisi via The Associated Press.

Just after 2 p.m., before the storm even made landfall, power was out for the entire island. About 1.3 million residents were impacted. Power restored for about 100,000 overnight according to LUMA Energy, Puerto Rico’s main power supplier. LUMA warned that full power restoration in Puerto Rico could take several days, with the storm creating “incredibly challenging” conditions for repair workers. “

The current weather conditions are extremely dangerous and are hampering our ability to fully assess the situation,” according to LUMA’s website. This is the second island-wide power outage in less than six months and Puerto Rico has struggled with an unreliable power grid for years.

[Related: Forecasters predict an abnormally high number of storms for this hurricane season—again.]

The National Hurricane center reported 12-18 inches of rainfall with a local maximum of 30 inches particularly across eastern and southern Puerto Rico.

Several large landslides have been reported across Puerto Rico and a temporary bridge built after Hurricane Maria washed away in the central town of Utuado. Lee-Ann Ingles-Serrano, a National Weather Service Meteorologist in San Juan, said the island is likely to see heavy showers today, with several more inches of rain likely. “It will not be comparable to what we had yesterday, but it will be enough to exacerbate the problems that we have in some parts of the island,” she said this morning.

Fiona is the third hurricane of the season and is forecast to become a major hurricane (Category 3 or higher) in roughly 48 hours, east of the Bahamas. It hits Puerto Rico on the the 33rd anniversary anniversary of Hurricane Hugo, which hit as a Category 3 storm.

It is also hitting only two days before the fifth anniversary of the devastating Hurricane Maria. The Category 5 storm was the deadliest disaster on American soil in 100 years, due in part to the response by the Trump administration and a centuries long history of colonialism. Nearly 3,000 people died, while island didn’t have full power for almost a year, after the climate change fueled storm dropped more than 150 inches of rain.

The hurricane made landfall in the Dominican Republic this morning. Throughout the day, the northern and eastern parts of the Dominican Republic could also see 4-8 inches of rainfall, with a local maximum of 12 inches possible, before tracking northwestward into the western Atlantic Ocean. Fiona’s eye wall is expected to pass over part of the Turks and Caicos Islands early this week and the NHC forecasts that the storm will strengthen to a Category 3 hurricane by midweek.

For most of today, the storm will continue to wreck havoc on Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.

“These rains will produce life-threatening and catastrophic flash and urban flooding across Puerto Rico and the eastern Dominican Republic, along with mudslides and landslides in areas of higher terrain,” the hurricane center tweeted .

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To control unpredictable water and stop floods, you might build a dam. To build a dam, you generally need hills and dales—geographic features to hold water in a reservoir. Which is why dams don’t fare well in Bangladesh, most of which is a flat floodplain that’s just a few feet above sea level.

Instead, in a happy accident, millions of Bangladeshi farmers have managed to create a flood control system of their very own, taking advantage of the region’s wet-and-dry seasonal climate. As farmers pump water from the ground in the dry season, they free up space for water to flood in during the wet season, hydrogeologists found. 

Researchers published the system they’d uncovered in the journal Science on September 15. And authorities could use the findings to make farming more sustainable, writes Aditi Mukherji, a researcher in Delhi for the International Water Management Institute who wasn’t involved in the paper, in a companion article in Science.

“No one really intended this to happen, because farmers didn’t have the knowledge when they started pumping,” says Mohammad Shamsudduha, a geoscientist at University College London in the UK and one of the paper’s authors.

[Related: What is a flash flood?]

Most of Bangladesh lies in the largest river delta on the planet, where the Rivers Ganges and Brahmaputra fan out into the Bay of Bengal. It’s an expanse of lush floodplains and emerald forests, blanketing some of the most fertile soil in the world. Indeed, that soil supports a population density nearly thrice that of New Jersey, the densest US state.

Like much of South Asia, Bangladesh’s climate revolves around the yearly monsoon. The monsoon rains support local animal and plant life and are vital to agriculture, too. But a heavy monsoon can cause devastating floods, as residents of northern Bangladesh experienced in June.

Yet Bangladesh’s warm climate means that farmers can grow crops, especially rice, in the dry season. To do so, farmers often irrigate their fields with water they draw up from the ground. Many small-scale farmers started doing so in the 1990s, when the Bangladeshi government loosened restrictions on importing diesel-powered pumps and made them more affordable. 

The authors of the new study wanted to examine whether pumping was depriving the ground of its water. That’s generally not very good, resulting in strained water supplies and the ground literally sinking (just ask Jakarta). They examined data from 465 government-controlled stations that monitor Bangladesh’s irrigation efforts across the country.

[Related: How climate change fed Pakistan’s devastating floods]

The situation was not so simple: In many parts of the country, groundwater wasn’t depleting at all.

It’s thanks to how rivers craft the delta. The Ganges and the Brahmaputra carry a wealth of silt and sediment from as far away as the Himalayas. As they fan out through the delta, they deposit those fine particles into the surrounding land. These sediments help make the delta’s soil as fertile as it is. 

This accumulation also results in loads of little pores in the ground. When the heavy rains come, instead of running off into the ocean or adding to runaway flooding, all that water can soak into the ground, where farmers can use it.

Where a dam’s reservoir is more like a bucket, Bangladesh is more like a sponge. During the dry season, farmers dry out the sponge. That gives it more room to absorb more water in the monsoon. And so forth, in an—ideally—self-sustaining cycle. Researchers call it the Bengal Water Machine. 

“The operation of the [Bengal Water Machine] was suspected by a small number of hydrogeologists within our research network but essentially unknown prior to this paper,” says Richard Taylor, a hydrogeologist at University College London in the UK, and another of the paper’s authors.

“If there was no pumping, then this would not have happened,” says Kazi Matin Uddin Ahmed, a hydrogeologist at the University of Dhaka in Bangladesh, and another of the paper’s authors. 

Storing water underground instead of a dam has a few advantages, Ahmed adds. The subsurface liquid is at less risk of evaporating into useless vapor. It doesn’t rewrite the region’s geography, and farmers can draw water from their own land, rather than relying on water shuttled in through irrigation channels.

The researchers believe that other “water machines” might fill fertile deltas elsewhere in the tropics with similar wet-and-dry climates. Southeast Asia might host a few, at the mouths of the Red River, the Mekong, and the Irrawaddy.

But an ominous question looms over the Bengal Water Machine: What happens as climate change reshapes the delta? Most crucially, a warming climate might intensify monsoons and change where they deliver their rains. “This is something we need to look into,” says Shamsudduha.

The Bengal Water Machine faces several other immediate challenges. In 2019, in response to overpumping concerns, the Bangladeshi government reintroduced restrictions on which farmers get to install a pump, which could make groundwater pumping more inaccessible. Additionally, many farmers use dirty diesel-powered pumps. (The government’s now encouraging farmers to switch to solar power.)

Also, keeping the Bengal Water Machine ship-shape means not using too much groundwater. Unfortunately, that’s already happening. Bangladesh’s west generally gets less rainfall than its east, and the results reflect that. The researchers noticed groundwater depletion in the west that wasn’t happening out east.

“There is a limit,” says Ahmed. “There has to be close monitoring of the system.”

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Last week, the Biden Administration announced a new, massive geospatial data project aimed at keeping Americans informed and up-to-date on the now near-constant ecological issues facing the country. Developed through an interagency collaborative effort working under the US Global Change Research Program and funded by the Department of Interior and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Climate Mapping for Resilience and Adaptation (CMRA) “provides a live dashboard to help communities see extreme weather and other hazards from climate change they are facing, while also providing maps projecting how each community could be impacted in the future,” according to an official White House press statement.

It’s an impressive toolset that could certainly help the public prepare for an increasingly volatile, costly, and dangerous climate, and includes stark visualizations of our current situation. There are also resources and data for community organizations, local, state, Federal, and Tribal governments to aid in planning, as well as links to grant funding made available for various projects through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

[Related: America’s infrastructure is a crisis of inequity.]

Throughout the CMRA site, however, readers will probably notice a particular phrase reappearing multiple times: climate resilience.

According to the US Climate Resilience Toolkit’s glossary, it refers to “the capacity of a community, business, or natural environment to prevent, withstand, respond to, and recover from a disruption.” While the Toolkit was first launched in 2014 and the phrase itself has roots as far back as the 1960s and 1970s, climate resilience has largely been relegated to ecological and academic discussions over the years. But with nearly a third of Americans currently residing in designated drought-stricken areas, 40 million people living under active inland or coastal flood alerts, and 300 registered wildfires across the nation, society’s attention is quickly shifting towards how to endure these emergencies. As such, expect to begin seeing more and more discussions surrounding climate resilience in the coming months and years.

The original concept of climate resilience began as a theory that ecological systems constantly tried to maintain a certain, stable equilibrium, and would potentially introduce negative feedback systems if necessary to combat deviations. This once prevalent belief gradually lost favor among experts, but its underpinnings would soon go on to influence social scientists, anthropologists, and critical theorists. Today, the term “climate resiliency” frequently refers to both ecosystems and societal abilities to withstand, adapt, and respond to environmental crises. Examples of human climate resilience strategies include building and retroactively updating structures to withstand increased weather-related stress, anticipating and planning for future public health issues, as well as constructing new housing developments according to modernized, green federal building codes.

[Related: Is ‘cloud seeding’ actually helping fight drought?]

The good news is that it’s clear at least some federal officials recognize this, and are producing immensely valuable tools like the CMRA to mitigate future disasters. The bad news is it’s yet another confirmation that we as a society have already passed a point of no return when it comes to staving off dramatic, longterm climate chaos.”[E]ven if we aggressively cut emissions—and we must—the early impacts of climate change are already here,” the Union of Concerned Scientists wrote in a report earlier this year. “They grow more severe every year, and because carbon pollution doesn’t just disappear—it remains in the atmosphere for decades—climate impacts are here for the long run.”

The chance that we as a species could completely avoid this new and uncertain era has long since passed. For decades, corporations, politicians, and public deniers convinced many people that eco-collapse was an overblown issue or outright hoax. That lie is now nearly impossible to maintain as island nations face literal extinction, countries like Pakistan endure historic monsoons, and “doomsday” ice shelfs teeter on the brink of collapse. We’ve heard about climate change, sustainability, and prevention methods for years—climate resilience is another subject entirely.

Now that the government is vocalizing climate resilience education and policy, it’s easy to envision corporations and businesses that once downplayed reality’s severity latching onto the “new” phrase via greenwashing. But a vital component of climate resiliency will be seeing through these kinds of campaigns and focusing on what we really need to survive and strengthen our communities—tools like the Climate Mapping for Resilience and Adaptation project and similar endeavors.

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The western US has faced historic drought month after month, and the water levels at Lake Powell and Lake Mead are dangerously low. Those reservoirs provide much-needed water to millions of Americans and feed the agricultural industry in the region. The drought also reduces the ability to render hydroelectric power from these crucial water sources. 

But, the US is far from the only place experiencing extreme dryness. Countries like China are also struggling, as well as parts of Europe and Africa. China has turned to cloud seeding as a potential solution to its drought problems. It’s also being more regularly utilized in the United Arab Emirates. 

Cloud seeding is more or less a technological way to make it rain, even when the weather is anything but rainy. Planes fly over a region, releasing a compound like silver iodide into clouds to cause condensation. The silver iodide causes condensation by giving water vapors a particle to cling to. 

[Related: Mini desalination plants could refresh the parched West.]

As water vapor clings to the silver iodide particle, it gets heavier and eventually drops to the earth as rain. Research has shown cloud seeding may increase precipitation by 5 to 15 percent, which may not seem like much, but anything helps during a drought. In China, results are mixed, but one study did show it did help produce enough precipitation to decrease air pollution near Beijing in 2021.

Cloud seeding requires the use of planes, which means the process relies on fossil fuels. That’s not ideal when you’re fighting the growing effects of climate change. However, drones and rockets also work to drop those rain-bringing particles. 

Cloud seeding already happens across states like Arizona and California, but interest in the technology appears to be increasing. But not everyone is on board. Critics say it’s expensive, and it’s unclear if it’s that effective. 

Michael Mann, a distinguished earth and environmental science professor at the University of Pennsylvania, tells Popular Science that he doesn’t believe cloud seeding will be that helpful. “It’s another example of an attempted techno-fix… that at best can only help at the margins,” Mann says.

Mann says there’s increasing “desperation” for a quick fix to the effects of climate change, but climate change doesn’t have any quick fixes. He compares cloud seeding to other geoengineering methods, like reflecting sunlight before it hits the earth using sulfate aerosols or ocean fertilization with phytoplankton, proposed to solve climate change. 

The primary effort that needs to happen, he says, is reducing carbon emissions so that things don’t get worse. Mann also says there’s also potential for international conflict when countries manipulate the environment to deal with the effects of climate change. 

“What makes matters worse are the governance and political impacts. What if China starts doing cloud seeding, and a drought occurs in Korea?” Mann says. “Will Korea blame China and seek reparations? Or sanctions? It’s a hornet’s nest.”

[Related: Lake Powell’s drought is part of a growing threat to hydropower everywhere.]

Luckily, this high-tech but seemingly high-stakes method isn’t the only way to get much-needed water to the driest parts of the planet. For example, Mann estimates that there will likely be an increase in desalination technologies in the West, which could help deal with water shortages. Desalination technologies can filter saltwater from the ground and the ocean to become usable as drinking water and for watering crops. However, he notes the technology is typically expensive to utilize.

Mann adds that these droughts and heat waves aren’t in line to get any better, so these problems aren’t going away anytime soon. Research indicates drought could affect three-quarters of the planet by 2050. 

“There will certainly be year-to-year variability due to things like El Niño,” he adds, “but the trend line will only get worse—more widespread and intense heat and drought, in the absence of concerted climate action.”

Cloud seeding may have a small impact on the drought, but governments will need to do everything they can to address climate change and deal with these long-term problems. That could mean continuing to implement expensive desalination projects, increasing water use efficiency, and especially moving towards carbon emissions goals rapidly. 

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One-third of Pakistan is now underwater. The country is currently dealing with one of the worst floods in a decade, with record-breaking rains leaving 1,325 people dead and more than 33 million without homes. Climate change experts say that these extreme weather conditions did not come out of the blue, suggesting that global warming is likely the cause behind the flooding and will likely instigate future flooding events.

While studies have yet to confirm the official cause behind the disastrous waters in Pakistan, the flood “has all the signs of a climate change-enhancing event,” says Benjamin Zaitchik, a climate change scientist at Johns Hopkins University. There are several leads that researchers, such as Zaitchik, are following to understand why the relentless monsoon occurred and what weather conditions should be monitored to prepare for events in the future. 

One of the most likely scenarios involves greenhouse gases. With greenhouse gases warming the air, Zaitchik explains that extreme precipitation rates are expected to increase in many regions. This is because warm air holds more water vapor than cold air. As you warm air, it transports more moisture, creating the right conditions for extreme rainfall. 

Another potential cause for the intense flooding in Pakistan could be related to meandering jet streams. Jet streams are fast flowing, strong winds five to seven miles above the atmosphere. The air currents travel across the globe but there are times when they “wiggle around” slightly, explains Zaitchik, causing cold air to come in from the north or warm air to come from the south.

[Related: A ‘monsoon on steroids’ has submerged a third of Pakistan]

Jet streams blow from west to east with the flow shifting from north and south. “It’s the difference between the really warm air at the equator and the cold air at the pole that keeps the jet streams in line as they whip around the planet,” he says. The bigger the temperature difference in the air, the better the balance at keeping the jet stream. During the winter when the temperature gap is at an all-time high, jet streams travel with strong and fast cold winds to the south. But in the summer, the warm air drives jet streams to travel slowly up north. 

However, under global warming, the jet streams are flowing more often in a meandering pattern: some currents are dipping and rising, even splitting away more often than they should. Zaitchik explains that when you warm the planet with greenhouse gases, the difference in cold air from the poles and warm air from the equator gets smaller. As jet streams wiggle around more often, Zaitchik says it can create situations called blocking patterns, where a jet stream blocks the air and creates a particular high or low pressure current that stays longer over an area. This can  cause prolonged weather patterns than usual, like a heatwave. 

Heat waves on land could also be a potential culprit. Zaitchik explains that as warm air rises, it creates a low-pressure system over regions like in Pakistan, which already experience hot and dry temperatures. The low pressure sucks the air coming in and removes moisture from the ocean. Martin Stute, a hydrologist and environmental science professor at Barnard College, says that the world is currently in a La Niña period that tends to make Pakistan and other Asian countries wetter in the summer. Warm moisture taken from the ocean feeds into storms, intensifying winds and rainfall. The “heat wave leads to dry and hot conditions that bring more wet fuel, to power the event,” explains Zaitchik.

[Related: What is a flash flood?]

Another type of wet fuel for extreme flooding is the melting of glaciers in Pakistan. The country has over 7,200 glaciers, one of the largest number of glaciers outside the North and South Poles. With glaciers rapidly melting from constant high temperatures, Stute says they are contributing to higher stream flow. The runoff could have then fed lakes and rivers that overflowed into nearby towns and villages.

Although Zaitchik blames particularly rich first-world countries, such as the US and China, with large carbon footprints for the greenhouse gas emissions charging these natural disasters, the rest of the world often has to face the consequences. ​​Pakistan’s carbon use has grown in the past few years but its footprint is much smaller than developed countries. For example, Pakistan has a 0.67 percent carbon emission rate while the US is nearly 14 percent. ”We’re seeing some of the poor countries with relatively low per capita carbon emissions, but also low infrastructure and climate resilience, bearing the brunt of the impacts,” says Zaitchik. 

Pakistan’s flooding is devastating, but expected. As a developing country, Pakistan has made strides in exporting textile and leather goods as well as energy production. However, its troubles with housing, health, and poverty may make it difficult to reconstruct millions of lost homes. 

Stute says cities and nations need to adapt for more floods, whether it’s through raising settlements or installing more deep wells for access to clean drinking water. “We expect this flooding to be more common in the future,” he says. “Even if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases tomorrow we will see further increases in global temperatures [because] the Earth’s climate system needs time to adjust.”

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As a historic September heat wave begins to taper off in the western United States, a tropical storm is spinning a little too close to comfort for southern California. Tropical Storm Kay is moving north along Mexico’s Baja California peninsula through today, bringing with it a massive amount of moisture and potentially gusty winds and dangerous surf.

The storm is is expected to weaken until it’s about 250 miles away from San Diego and as it move along the US West Coast. This is the closest a tropical system has come to the region since Hurricane Nora in 1997. Forecasters say areas of flash flooding are probable in the region today through Sunday, with the up to five inches of rainfall possible for the interior mountains of southern California.

“Confidence remains high for a significant rainfall event across this region,” the National Weather Service said in an online discussion yesterday.

[Related: NOAA is changing the way it talks about hurricanes.]

The storm is already blamed for at least three deaths in the state of Guerrero, Mexico. Kay made landfall on Thursday afternoon as a Category 1 hurricane, near Bahia Asuncion in the state of Baja California Sur. It weakened to a tropical storm sustained winds of 70 miles per hour. According to The Associated Press, the state government of Baja California Sur said more than 1,600 people had evacuated to shelters and some creeks were rising and closed some roads. Landslides reportedly cut some roadways on the peninsula, but there were no reports of injuries.

Near Riverside, California, some thunderstorms associated with Kay have already started to rumble, with isolated heavy rain and lightning. Although the rainfall is desperately needed in the bone-dry region, the National Weather Service cautions that this moisture is not without danger. “Despite those positives, it’s never a good thing to get too much rain all at once, a trait all too common among slow-moving tropical storms,” wrote the Weather Service.

Flash flooding from the rain is most likely in burn scars (areas where fire has stripped away the vegetation that absorbs water) in narrow slot canyons, and in urbanized areas like San Diego and Palm Springs in California and Yuma in Arizona.

[Related: What is a flash flood?]

Flood watches have been posted from western Arizona to southern California. In these areas, rainfall of more than two inches is likely with up to 4 or 5 inches possible. Eastern slopes of mountains, where winds from the east will intensify the rain are most likely where this heavier rain will fall. Two to four inches of rain between today and Sunday is expected at Imperial County Airport in southeastern California. This region only sees 2.38 inches of rain per year and will break a record set in 1976 if it receives more than three inches of rain.

Other concerns with the storm are dangerous waves and rip currents and cloud-to-ground lightning from thunderstorms that could spark wildfires.

This rare California tropical storm comes as the Atlantic Hurricane Season has remained eerily quiet. “No tropical cyclones formed in the basin during August,” said the National Hurricane Center in its monthly recap. “This is quite unusual and is the first time that has occurred since 1997, and is only the third time that has happened since 1950.” Hurricane Danielle become the first named storm of the year on September 2nd with Earl quickly following behind. While it has been far from the active season first predicted, there is still plenty of time for more hurricanes in the Atlantic.

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The idea for Promesa was born one afternoon in May 2017 when Mikael Jakobsson and Aziria Rodríguez Arce were playing a round of Puerto Rico, a highly rated, award-winning board game. The premise is that players act as colonial governors and slave owners on the US territory and island, and win points by running plantations, constructing buildings, and shipping goods to Spain. Jakobsson says Puerto Rico came from a 1990’s board game “renaissance” in Europe that popularized themes of exploration, expansion, exploitation, and extermination in the industry.

“It’s playing oppression. It’s like history fan fiction with all these games… You find an island and it’s yours” says Jakobsson, a lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and research coordinator at the university’s Game Lab. “It’s a pretty shitty theme for a board game.” 

To break the all-too-popular pattern, over the past two years, Jakobsson has been working with Puerto Rican graphic artist Rosa Colón Guerra to create Promesa, a new board game that more accurately reflects the reality of Puerto Rico’s history and people. The game is based on the real-life PROMESA act, which was established by the US government in 2016 in response to the island’s debt crisis, putting American lawmakers in charge of the country’s finances. To win, you must settle Puerto Rico’s bills and build up the country’s infrastructure, education, and social services.

[Related: Climate-related food shortages are driving more Puerto Ricans to farming]

With its unconventional premise and solutions-geared gameplay, Promesa stands out from other options already on the market. For one, it’s set in the present to familiarize players with the challenges Puerto Ricans are facing today. “When a game is set in the distant past, I think it’s to not upset anyone … We don’t have to worry about human suffering,” Jakobsson says. “But we need to see that Puerto Rico is still an actual territory.”

To see exactly how this reframing changes a board-game-playing experience, I played a round of Promesa in late August. I’m no board game expert, but I am competitive—and I wanted to see what Jakobsson’s idea of winning looked like. 

Navigating catastrophe

The artwork on Promesa is some of the most detailed and vibrant I’ve seen. Colón Guerra, currently a resident at MIT’s Visiting Artists program, traveled all over her home country to capture important local landscapes and ensure that the visuals reflected the people there. Somehow, she squeezed the 3,500-square-mile island down to a roughly 4-foot-square board. Lagoons, castles, and sea animals dot the edges as a waterfall and ruins hold court at the center. A dock, on the southwest corner, is painted like the Puerto Rican flag. If you recognize some of the landmarks, Jakobsson says this is by design: they wanted the depiction of Puerto Rico to feel familiar to those who know the island.

I’m sitting in the Game Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with fellow MIT students, Grace and Iris, for a trial run of Promesa. A pile of crystalline black gems is balanced precariously on a blue “raft’”: These gems represent the country’s debt, while the raft symbolizes the blue tarps that still cover many houses on the island after Hurricane Maria. Our mission is to work together to slowly push the raft off the island without spilling any gems—or else more obstacles will hinder us. Throughout the game, we must invest in education, social services, and infrastructure by adding gems from each of these categories (colored bright green, blue, and yellow) to the pile of debt gems on the raft. This reflects the cost of investing in these areas, and adds to the difficulty of moving the raft. At the same time, paying into education or infrastructure, for example, allows us to take certain actions, like get rid of debt gems or push the raft farther off the island, that help us reach the final goal. 

“You three are now the lawmakers in charge of handling Puerto Rico’s debt crisis,” Jakobsson says to open the game. “Congratulations.”

We laugh nervously. “This game seems like it might be hard to win,” Grace says with a slight smile as she tips the gems onto the raft to launch us into more than a hundred years of colonial exploitation and economic burden. A few of the pieces fall off, and we exchange looks as Jakobsson places two red setback gems on the “catastrophe” scale. Once we hit five, disaster strikes. (The nature of the event isn’t specified, but Jakobsson alludes to some of the recent hurricanes and earthquakes that have damaged the island.) After the third catastrophe, the game is immediately over.

A few rounds later, we reach our first catastrophe and have to give up five of our hard-earned education and infrastructure gems. Without those, we’re not allowed to push the raft off the island anymore—we have to spend more on education and infrastructure and incur extra debt before Puerto Rico can progress. 

“You’ve still got time,” Jakobsson says, when we let out slightly distressed groans. “But not a lot.”

Win and lose together

From the start, Jakobsen says his idea was to show that the island’s debt can’t fully be paid off. 

But it took several years of research for him and Arce, an MIT graduate student and consultant on the project, to reflect that nuance in the aims, rules, and construct of a board game. In the summer of 2018, Jakobsson received a grant from the university to travel to Puerto Rico, where they worked with scholars and colleagues to learn what residents were most concerned about, and how those core issues might effectively be designed into a game. After weeks of interviews and analysis, the team settled on the topic of the debt crisis. 

Promesa went through many iterations, starting off with a card game structure and then changing formats completely. Eventually, the makers settled on the throughline of getting rid of the country’s debt on a raft, based on the images of the blue tarps they saw after Hurricane Maria. They wanted to send the raft floating, metaphorically, back to Washington, D.C. to “leave the debt where it belonged.” With that part established, the rest of the game came together more quickly. 

Ultimately, the structure of the game differs from any that require players to best others to win. It’s a collaborative, cooperative game—you win and lose together. 

“A lot of games are built around mechanics that perpetuate certain ideas of Western progress. It’s like, ‘might makes right.’ It’s not about ethics—it’s about having a powerful army,  corporation, or whatever it is that makes you a winner,” Jakobsson says. “So we try to challenge some of those ideas.” 

Tabletop lessons

So why spend so much energy on conveying history through a board game that’s supposed to be fun? Wouldn’t this kind of effort be more meaningful in a book or documentary? Board games are a powerful medium, Jakobsson says, because we can engage with them in personal spaces where it can be hard for other political messages to reach. Even if players don’t become experts on Puerto Rico’s colonial past, portraying a different kind of history is important on its own. 

“I think there is something about playing out an issue versus just reading or hearing about it that can grip you a little deeper, and maybe can be a little more memorable,” Jakobsson explains. 

He adds that he doesn’t think that Euro-games, with their fixation on conquest, are designed to be intentionally harmful. After all, they can be fun to play. But they still have an impact on players’ views and actions in the real world. Games and other media, Jakobsson says, are cultural artifacts that shape our understanding of the people and places around us. “They are reflections of the society or the culture in which we create them. And culture, to some extent, reflects the games we play. So I think there’s a lot of learning going on in games.

[Related: Two-player games that won’t turn you and your friend into enemies]

At the moment, the team is printing a limited run of Promesa. They’ve faced challenges in production and distribution due to the pandemic and slowed-down supply chains, but in the future, they hope to crowdfund resources to support wider access to the game. 

Jakobsson hopes that Promesa can nudge game designers in a different direction of storytelling and cultural engagement. Even though the board game industry is surging, explicitly anti-colonialist games like Promesa are still rare. More games that buck traditional trends of “exploration, expansion, exploitation, and extermination” will lead to more interesting directions, he says. 

“The idea that games are just for fun and nothing else—that is already starting to be a little less common among younger players,” Jakobsson points out. Many of his students at MIT look for games that have more complex and mature themes about social issues. In his experience, “there’s nothing outlandish about a board game about a political debt crisis.”

Earlier this summer, Ravensburger, the parent company that owns the original Puerto Rico, announced that they would release another game this fall: Puerto Rico 1897. This new version, which marks the year the country achieved autonomy from Spain, moves away from colonial themes: The goal is now to be the most prosperous farmer on the island. But there is still no acknowledgement of the US takeover in 1898. 

Journey’s end

It’s the last move: Grace, Iris, and I have one chance to push the raft off the island. We draw our last gems (not red, thankfully), and add them to the perilously high stack. The edges of the silicon blue square resist the neoprene material of the board and, for some reason, my fingers are shaking. I hold my breath while pushing, and it seems to pay off—we successfully get the raft into the deep-blue waters of the Atlantic. 

Jakobsson warned us it would be a tough journey, but after several rounds of luck, collaboration, and, notably, delicate pushing, we managed to resolve Puerto Rico’s debt crisis. After celebrating our win, Iris and Grace admit they hadn’t known about the PROMESA Act before playing. Iris says that, during each of her moves, she kept imagining what investing in infrastructure, education, and social services on the island might actually be like. 

“Well,” Jakobsson says, “at least we did that.”

Correction (September 10, 2022): Mikael Jakobsson’s last name was misspelled in some references. They have now been corrected.

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While Labor Day marks the unofficial end to summer, this sweltering season is tightening its grip on the western United States. A potentially historic heat wave has 46 million people in six states under an excessive heat warning today.

The unprecedented heat is smashing temperatures records from the San Francisco Bay area further east to Idaho and Montana, with more broken records expected tomorrow. Further south towards Death Valley, California, forecasters expect the region to break its September heat record of 125 degrees Fahrenheit. Salt Lake City, Utah has broken its previous September record of 100 degrees three times during this past week.

The heatwave began on August 30 and is expected to peak today or tomorrow, with temperatures gradually falling.

Some of the most excessive heat is forecast for California’s Central Valley. According to the National Weather Service, the capital city of Sacramento has a 67 percent chance to match its September record of 109 degrees tomorrow.

[Related: How US cities are preparing for more life-threatening heatwaves.]

The heat is putting immense strain on the power grid, as desperate residents crank up the air conditioning to stay safe. The California Independent System Operator (ISO), has issued multiple “Flex Alerts,” calling energy conservation between the hours 4 p.m. and 9 p.m. to avoid power outages.

“California consumers and businesses have responded to our Flex Alert calls with helpful reductions in their electricity use during the grid’s most challenging hours,” said California ISO chief executive Elliot Mainzer in a video update on Saturday, ahead of the extension of the alert. “Cooperation like this makes a real difference, so thank you everyone for that help.” The agency is bracing for peak demand on Tuesday of more than 50,000 megawatts.

While global warming is causing heat waves like this one to occur with greater frequency, this record-breaking heat is caused by a particularly nasty situation called a heat dome. Heat domes occur when the atmosphere acts like a giant hat and traps in hot air over land or water. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), this phenomenon occurs when strong, high-pressure atmospheric conditions combine with influences from La Niña. The high pressure system pushes hot air downward, compresses it, and warms it further. This creates huge areas of sweltering heat that gets trapped under the “dome” of high-pressure. The heat dome also stop clouds from forming, making it less likely for cloud cover to block the sun’s heat or relief from rain.

[Related: A ‘heat dome’ is searing the US with record-breaking temperatures.]

The air circulation patterns higher up in the atmosphere will also influence whether high pressure persists and trigger a heat wave. As prevailing winds from the Pacific Ocean move the hot air east over land, northern shifts of the jet stream trap the air and move it toward land. There, the hot air sinks, resulting in heat waves. As the arctic has warmed due to climate change, the jet stream has slowed down, causing these areas of heat to be stuck in one place longer.

According to The San Francisco Chronicle, these heat domes can even overcome the cooling effect of California’s marine layer (air chilled by the Pacific Ocean). Heat domes are more commonly seen above the land, but marine heat waves can also occur.

Climate change has also made California a more humid place. In an interview with The Washington Post, Alexander Gershunov from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography said, “with higher humidity, temperatures don’t really drop that much at night. And in terms of health impacts, that pretty much removes the nighttime respite that we need to face another day of scorching heat.”

These overall trends are not a surprise to researchers. Of all the extreme weather events, heat waves are “the most closely-related and directly-impacted by global warming,” adds Gershunov.

Heatwaves are among the most dangerous natural hazards, killing more than 166,000 people between 1998 and 2017. To keep cool (even without air conditioning) scientists recommend wearing loos fitting clothing in lighter colors that don’t absorb as much heat, staying hydrated, taking cool showers throughout the day, and blocking out the sun using curtains or shades.

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The United Nations weather agency is predicting that a La Niña weather pattern is positioned to last through the end of this year. This is the first “triple dip” event of this century, and refers to the three straight years of La Niña’s effect on global climate patterns like worldwide drought and flooding.

Yesterday, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) announced that La Niña conditions have strengthened in the eastern and central equatorial Pacific with an increase in trade winds in recent weeks. The WMO predicts the continuation of the current La Niña pattern over the next six months, with a 70 percent chance in September to November 2022, but gradually decreasing to 55 percent in December to February 2022-2023. The current La Niña pattern began in September 2020.

A triple-dip La Niña has only happened two other times since 1950, with the most recent lasting from late summer 1998 through early spring 2001.

“It is exceptional to have three consecutive years with a La Nina event. Its cooling influence is temporarily slowing the rise in global temperatures, but it will not halt or reverse the long-term warming trend,” said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas, in a press release. “The worsening drought in the Horn of Africa and southern South America bear the hallmarks of La Niña, as does the above average rainfall in South-East Asia and Australasia. The new La Niña Update unfortunately confirms regional climate projections that the devastating drought in the Horn of Africa will worsen and affect millions of people.”

Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia are facing their worst drought in 40 years. On August 26, the WMO projected that drought is set to worsen following a fifth consecutive failed rainy season. The drought could lead to an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe.

La Niña is a natural and cyclical cooling of ocean surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean. The cooling is coupled with changes in the tropical atmospheric circulation, particularly winds, barometric pressure, and rainfall. This cooling doesn’t mean that global-warming is letting up. During La Niña events, trade winds are typically stronger than usual and push more warm water toward Asia.

[Related: NOAA’s powerful new weather forecasting supercomputers are now online.]

Upwelling increases off the western coast of America, which brings cold, nutrient-rich water up to the surface. The colder surface waters in the Pacific Ocean push the jet stream north, which tends to lead to drought conditions in the southern part of the United States and heavy rains and flooding in the Pacific Northwest and Canada. Winter temperatures are warmer than normal in the South and cooler than normal in the North during a La Niña year, and the weather event can also lead to a more severe hurricane season.

El Niño has the opposite affect on global weather patterns: the trade winds weaken and warm water is pushed toward the west coast of the Americas. The Pacific jet stream moves south, giving areas in the northern US and Canada dryer and warmer than usual conditions, and wetter conditions in the Southeast and Gulf Coast.

[Related: It looks like we’re in for another La Niña winter. What does that mean?]

Together, these events are called El Niño/La Niña Southern Oscillation (ENSO). According to the WMO, recent scientific progress has helped our understanding and better modeling has improved prediction skills to within a range of one to nine months in advance. These warnings give countries better opportunities prepare for associated hazards like heavy rains, floods and drought.

“WMO will continue to provide tailored information to the humanitarian sector and to support sensitive sectors like agriculture, food security, health, and disaster risk reduction,” said Taalas. “WMO is also striving towards the goal that everyone should have access to early warning systems in the next five years to protect them against hazards related to our weather, climate and water.”

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As countries around the world experience serious drought conditions, Pakistan is facing unprecedented flooding. Floodwaters have submerged roughly one-third of the country, an area about the size of Colorado, underwater. Following eight consecutive weeks of rainfall since June, at least 1,136 people have died according to Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority. The government estimates that the floods have affected more than 33 million people, over 15 percent of its population of 220 million, and has declared a national emergency and appealed for international aid.

The downpours are sending flooding down from northern mountains and melting the country’s numerous glaciers, destroying homes and villages, and wiping away crops. In an interview with Sky News, Pakistan’s climate change minister Sherry Imran called the flooding “apocalyptic,” noting on Twitter that one town in Sindh saw 67 inches of rain in one day.

[Related: Severe droughts are bringing archaeological wonders and historic horrors to the surface.]

This disaster par with the devastating 2010 floods, which killed more than 2,000 and is deadliest flooding in Pakistan’s history. The first aid flights arrived from Turkey and the United Arab Emirates on Sunday, with tents, food, and other necessities. Qatar Red Crescent has also pledged emergency aid to Pakistan.

Today, the United Nations issued a flash appeal to raise $160 million to help the country recover and the World Food Programme (WFP) is working to dispatch aid to nearly half a million people in the provinces of Balochistan and Sindh. Mountainous regions in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa have also been badly hit and thousands of people in the northern Swat Valley have been ordered to evacuate. According to the WFP, access to the affected regions remains a critical issue, as more than 100 bridges and some 1,800 miles of roads have been damaged or destroyed, nearly 800,000 farm animals have died, and two million acres of crops and orchards have been deluged.

“Pakistan is awash in suffering,” said UN Secretary General António Guterres in a video message for the launch of the appeal. “The Pakistani people are facing a monsoon on steroids—the relentless impact of epochal levels of rain and flooding.”

The government estimates that the damage from the floods already cost more than $10 billion, adding that the world had an obligation to help the South Asian country cope with the effects of man-made climate change. Despite producing less than 1 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, Pakistan consistently ranks in the top 10 countries most vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

[Related: What a century of rising seas can tell us about the next 30 years.]

According to weather experts, the increasing number of extreme weather events (both too much water and not enough of it) is due to Earth’s rising temperatures. Warmer temperatures mean more water in the air, since for every degree of increased temperature, the air can hold about 4 percent more water.

Secretary General Guterres referred to South Asia as a “climate crisis hotspot,” where people are 15 times more likely to die from climate impacts. “Let’s stop sleepwalking towards the destruction of our planet by climate change. Today, it’s Pakistan. Tomorrow, it could be your country.”

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This summer is already marked by megadroughts and extreme heat waves across the globe. A new report on extreme heat events from the First Street Foundation, a New York-based nonprofit that studies risks associated with climate change, shows how this summer is just the beginning. 

The 6th National Climate Risk Assessment: Hazardous Heat, released on August 15, uses a climate model to predict more than 100 million Americans will live in an “extreme heat belt” within the next 30 years. In these areas, residents could face at least one day per year with a heat index of 125 degrees Fahrenheit. 

The heat index is calculated by combining the actual air temperature with the humidity or dew point temperature to determine how it feels outside. A heat index of 125 degrees is at the top of the National Weather Service’s extreme danger level.

The future extreme heat belts cover a vast swath of the continental United States, with one region stretching from the Gulf Coast up to southern Wisconsin. Additional extreme heat belts stretch across the interior southwest and southeast coast.

[Related: Heat is the silent killer we should all be worried about.]

According to the report, communities will feel the sharpest heat increase in Miami-Dade County, Florida. Presently, Miami-Dade County can expect seven days with a heat index of 103 degrees. By 2053, that number could rise to 34 days per year. The report allows users to input their addresses into the Risk Factor and see how their property will be impacted by extreme heat by 2053. 

Even with technological advances, predicting temperatures in a long-range forecast is particularly difficult. This report, however, uses climatological modeling instead of meteorological modeling to create a long-range temperature forecast. To best calculate a property’s current heat exposure, the team used land surface temperatures, tree canopy cover, impervious surfaces like roads or sidewalks, green space, and proximity to a large body of water. Those measurements are then adjusted with the predicted emissions scenarios for the next three decades.

“Increasing temperatures are broadly discussed as averages, but the focus should be on the extension of the extreme tail events expected in a given year,” said Matthew Eby, founder, and CEO of First Street Foundation via press release. “We need to be prepared for the inevitable, that a quarter of the country will soon fall inside the Extreme Heat Belt with temperatures exceeding 125°F and the results will be dire.”

Extreme heat events are among the most dangerous natural hazards, with the Union of Concerned Scientists referring to May through October as the “danger season.” In summer 2021, the Pacific Northwest saw three days of record-breaking temperatures that officials estimate was the cause of at least 100 fatalities. Extreme heat events can also lead to prolonged power outages from strained electrical grids, cause roads to buckle, and even melt or lift airport runways. 

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Europe is facing another heat wave after July’s record-breaking bout of heat that caused deadly wildfires in the UK, France, and Spain. Seville, Spain, became the first city in the world to name a heat wave, calling the particularly brutal temperature spike “Zoe,” not unlike hurricanes or tropical storms, last month to underscore the threat it posed. 

But that’s not the only thing that has changed because of the massive heat waves ripping through the region. As of August 2nd, the Spanish government requires businesses to keep their thermostats at 27 degrees Celsius in the summer season (around 80 degrees Fahrenheit) or above to conserve energy (certain businesses, like bars and restaurants, can keep thermostats at around 25 degrees Celsius). Greece implemented a similar strategy for public buildings earlier in the summer. Energy prices have been high in recent months due to the war in Ukraine, and these heat waves are creating more demand for energy as people run air conditioners to try to stay cool.

Without climate change, these heat waves would be more or less impossible at this scale. Using more energy to keep indoor temperatures comfortable unfortunately contributes to climate change when energy is generated by burning fossil fuels. In Europe, about 70 percent of its power is generated by burning fossil fuels.

“If you increase your energy usage and your grid is still reliant, even partially, on fossil fuels, then that’s going to increase your total emissions,” says Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, “That’s going to make climate change worse. It’s a little bit of a feedback loop.”

That being said, Dessler feels air conditioning is a human right, which is a growing view. AC will only become more necessary as the climate warms. Ideally, countries will move off fossil fuels as quickly as possible, so higher energy demands don’t worsen climate change. Then, people can keep their homes and businesses at a comfortable temperature.

[Related: How to protect your children during heat waves.]

“AC is something we need. There are a lot of places in the US. and around the world where if you didn’t have air conditioning there would be ghost towns,” Dessler says. He says large parts of Texas, where he lives, need air conditioning to remain habitable. 

Places like Spain limiting how low a business can set its thermostat or states like Texas asking people to reduce energy use during a heat wave to protect the grid can cause real problems for residents. “People lived in Texas before air conditioning, but you just lived differently,” Dessler says. “They built their houses to be well-ventilated. There were designs for breezes to run through the house.”

In parts of the world where extreme heat is commonplace, homes are often designed to be well-ventilated and promote airflow to keep things cool. In the Middle East, a courtyard might funnel in a breeze and provide shade. Water fixtures and plants might provide cooling effects. Suppose we redesigned our homes and buildings to allow for better airflow, painted buildings lighter colors to reflect sunlight, and strategically placed windows and columns of air. In that case, homes could require less air conditioning to stay cool during extreme heat. 

“Nobody designs their house like that today because everyone in Texas has a house that’s closed, sealed and air conditioned,” he adds. “In the long run, you can design a city to do better in hot temperatures.”

Though these heat waves have been breaking records, Dessler says that doesn’t necessarily come as a surprise. As far as we know, climate change isn’t moving faster than climate scientists have predicted in their climate models. 

“The global average temperature is warming exactly as predicted. Predicting heat waves, which are local events on a very short timescale, is much harder to do,” Dessler says. “You obviously can do it with a model, and in general, the magnitude of these heat waves is not too far off from what the models predict.”

The world is going to need more and more air conditioning, and Dessler says that solar and wind are easier and more affordable to install than they’ve ever been before. Hence, countries need to build up renewable energy and get off fossil fuels so that increased energy demands don’t worsen climate change. 

If you’re worried about how your energy use contributes to climate change, you might want to get your community to start a microgrid or even consider installing a heat pump in your home. But in the meantime, shut down unnecessary appliances, strategically place fans, block sunlight, and manage your home’s humidity to help keep things cool without blasting the AC.

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This article was originally featured on Task & Purpose.

After two brutal losses to Mother Nature, the Navy finally scored a win this summer. On Aug. 3, the Navy was able to recover the F/A-18E Super Hornet that was knocked off the USS Harry S. Truman last month.

The fighter jet, part of Carrier Air Wing 1 on the Nimitz-class USS Harry S. Truman, was blown off the ship on July 8 thanks to what the Navy called “unexpected heavy weather.” One sailor was hurt during the incident. At the time, the Navy wasn’t immediately clear if it would try to recover the jet or not. But it seems they did. 

The Navy recovery operation found the Super Hornet roughly 9,500 feet below the surface. A salvage team made of several elements of the Navy used the multi-purpose construction vessel Everest as their base, going over to the part of the Mediterranean where the jet was lost. The team then used a CURV-21 remote-controlled salvage vehicle to rig lines to the jet, which was then hoisted back up to the Everest. It is being sent back to the United States, but it isn’t clear if that’s for repairs and redeployment or to be scrapped. (Check out The Aviationist for an exclusive photo of the jet after it was fished out of the water.)

It’s a win for the Navy, which at the time of the incident last month wasn’t immediately clear if it was going to attempt recovery or write off the fighter jet. Several military aviation mishaps have occurred in the last four months, but the USS Harry S. Truman incident was the only time this summer that a fighter jet sank beneath the waves (in January an F-35C II crashed into the ocean while trying to land onboard the USS Carl Vinson). 

It’s still unclear if it was properly secured when it was blown off the carrier. “The rapid response of the combined team, including SUPSALV and Phoenix International personnel, allowed us to conduct safe recovery operations within 27 days of the incident,” Lt. Cmdr. Miguel Lewis, U.S. Sixth Fleet salvage officer, said in a statement on the operation.

The F/A-18E’s weeks-long swim wasn’t the only incident in the last month where Mother Nature decided to wreck millions of dollars of the Navy’s hardware. On July 26, a severe storm tore through Virginia and hit Naval Station Norfolk. It damaged 10 helicopters, half of which were MH-60S Knight Hawks, with the rest comprising one MH-60R Sea Hawk and four MH-53E Sea Dragon helicopters.

Winds were so great that gusts reached as high as 60 miles per hour, according to locals near the base. Those winds toppled over and pushed the helicopters around the airfield, leaving visible damage, as photos of the aftermath show. That included overturned helicopters and bent and broken rotor blades. No one was injured in the storm, and it is currently unclear if the helicopters were properly secured ahead of time. However, the Navy is classifying them as “Class A Mishaps,” meaning either the vehicle was destroyed or damage exceeded $2.5 million. 

Heavy weather seems to have it out for the Navy this summer. 

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In a season marked by record breaking heat waves around the globe and widespread drought, an unlikely spot experienced one wet and hot summer in a single day.

Death Valley National Park on the California-Nevada border received almost 75% of its annual rainfall last Friday, triggering a wave of flash floods. According to park officials, no injuries have been reported, but the flood waters buried about 60 vehicles in mud and stranded hundreds of visitors and park employees. According to the California Department of Transportation, parts of State Route 190 will remain closed through at least August 17th. 

A storm generated by the annual Southwest Monsoon (also known as the North American Monsoon) dumped 1.46 inches of rain in Furnace Creek, an area that typically sees only 1.94 inches of rain per year.  Friday’s storm missed the previous record from 1988 by only one-one hundredth of a point, according to park officials. “The heavy rain that caused the devastating flooding at Death Valley was an extremely rare, 1000-year event,” said Daniel Berc, meteorologist with the National Weather Service Las Vegas in a press release. “A 1000-year event doesn’t mean it happens once per 1000 years, rather that there is a 0.1% chance of occurring in any given year.” 

[Related: Yellowstone National Park was never built to take on the rain and snow that comes with climate change]

Typically occurring during the months of June to September, the Southwest Monsoon changes the weather pattern in the bone dry region. The prevailing winds shift directions from out of the west to out of the south, bringing with it a surge of moisture and humidity from Mexico. The moisture can feed massive downpours that the parched and sparse desert soil cannot absorb quickly enough. The rainwater builds in low-lying areas and rapidly fills empty creek beds, which causes flash flooding. The 2022 Southwest monsoon season has been unusually active, with similar events flooding Las Vegas casinos and stranding motorists in Phoenix. 

Death Valley is an outlier among outliers and boasts being one of the hottest and driest places in the world. The region allegedly saw the highest temperature ever recorded on Earth (134 degrees Fahrenheit) on July 10, 1913, but there is debate among some climatologists on the legitimacy of that recording. In the summers of 2021 and 2020, Death Valley recorded 130 degrees, which may be the highest pair of reliably measured temperatures anywhere on the planet.

“Death Valley is an incredible place of extremes,” said park superintendent Mike Reynolds. “It is the hottest place in the world, and the driest place in North America. This week’s 1,000 year flood is another example of this extreme environment. With climate change models predicting more frequent and more intense storms, this is a place where you can see climate change in action!”

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The main thing about flash floods is the speed. By definition, the rushing waters of a flash flood begin within 6 hours after an intense storm—and often within 3 hours. Sometimes, the water can come within minutes. These sudden torrents bring devastation: After heat-related deaths, floods are the deadliest weather event in the US. 

Flash floods have been in the news most recently with record-breaking rainfall in Kentucky in late July that killed 37 people. And though the damage has been extensive, the state is not alone. Within the past several months, floods have repeatedly burst across the US: At the tail end of 2021, 17 inches of rain fell on Tennessee in a single day; 22 people were killed in the deluge. At the start of summer 2022, flash flooding shut down Yellowstone National Park. And in St. Louis, two days before the Kentucky floods, record rainfalls caused a flash flood that killed two people. 

Here’s what to know about these dangerous weather disasters.

Where do flash floods happen?

Flash floods differ from river floods or coastal floods. River flooding occurs when excessive runoff from rain or melting snow causes water to spill over the edges of riverbanks and onto the surrounding floodplains, over the course of many hours or even days. Coastal floods happen when seawater comes up on land, frequently during storms or storm surges. Flash floods, on the other hand, aren’t bound to where water already exists. In fact, though storms often precede flash floods, you don’t always have to see rain before flooding–snowmelt or precipitation might occur at a higher elevation and flow downhill. Levees, dams, or ice jams can break and, likewise, send walls of water into typically dry areas. 

Steep, mountainous topographies are particularly prone to flash floods, which happen in all 50 states. Urban areas are especially vulnerable, too. Dense concrete and other impervious surfaces in cities prevent water from sinking into the ground–instead, there’s 2 to 6 times more runoff than what would occur over absorbent dirt or other natural terrain. 

Excessive runoff in cities, without anywhere to go, often has the heaviest impact on those who can least afford to deal with it. It doesn’t take much rain to damage deteriorating or inadequate infrastructure, especially in places where large volumes of water overwhelm local stormwater drainage. Similarly, low areas like underpasses, garages, and basements can quickly become death traps. 

These kinds of fast-moving floods become dangerous quickly. It’s bad news if a flash flood comes when people are caught unawares, stuck at home, or in traffic. More than half of the deaths occur when people are trapped in their cars. Flash floods often manifest as walls of water that can wash away most things in its path and carry debris; they can reach heights of 30 feet or more and trigger equally dangerous mudslides. But the water doesn’t need to be very high to have severe consequences: Six inches of fast-moving water can knock people off their feet. Two feet of water can sweep cars away. A flood in Big Thompson Canyon, Colorado, in 1976–moving at a velocity of 30 feet per second– transported boulders that weighed as much as 250 tons.

Are flash floods becoming more severe?

Natural disasters are generally getting worse–and that’s true for floods, too. 

As climate change warms the atmosphere, extreme rainfall is rising, which increases the risk for flash floods. Heavy precipitation events are projected to increase by 2 to 3 times the historical average–and hurricanes and storm surges will increase other kinds of flooding, too. The Federal Emergency Management Agency expects the nation’s floodplains to expand by 45 percent by the century’s end, as the agency reported in a recent study. A study in early 2021 found that increased precipitation–resulting partially from climate change–costs the US an additional $2.5 billion each year in flood damage. And some studies show that flood frequency is increasing in the Mississippi River valley and across the Midwest in the last century, as well as in the Northeast over the past 50 years.

What’s the best way to prepare for a flood?

There are several steps you can take to prepare for flash floods–and stay safe should they happen in your neighborhood. First, know the level of risk by looking at flood maps. You may be federally required to have flood insurance if you live in a high-risk area.

The US Geological Survey has compiled a list of additional map resources, too, and the nonprofit First Street Foundation created a tool that provides additional context to assess your property risk from environmental threats. 

Pay attention to flash flood watches, which the National Weather Service issues to indicate when conditions could result in flash flooding. People in these areas should be ready to take action–particularly if the NWS announces a flash flood warning. That’s issued when flash floods are imminent and, at that point, people should immediately evacuate the area. 

But be particularly careful when traveling by car. Don’t drive through flooded streets–it’s difficult to gauge the water depth, and roadways hidden below the water can collapse from erosion. 

If flood waters cause your vehicle to stall out, abandon it and seek higher ground. Rapidly rising water can sweep the vehicle away. Know your surroundings and head to higher ground, and listen to NOAA radio updates when in a flood. 

It’s also important to develop an emergency preparedness plan with your family or those you live with to have a few days’ worth of resources. This handy guide shows some important things to consider when creating a plan. 

For more tips like these, check out FEMA’s flood information sheet. 

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Disaster risk and climate change are closely linked, and you can’t discuss one without including the other. Increasing global average temperature and widespread changes in weather patterns make extreme weather events more frequent or intense. In the United States, heat waves occurred three times more often in 2021 than in the 1960s.

Natural disasters such as droughts, storms, floods, and wildfires are more likely to happen. Globally, climate-related disasters averaged about 40 times a year in the 1970s, but this number increased to over 150 in the 2010s. This year, there have been unprecedented extreme weather events, like the flooding in South Central Montana or the four-season drought in Eastern Africa.

These only emphasize climate change’s effects and the importance of disaster preparedness. However, natural disasters don’t affect everyone the same way. 

Certain demographics are less likely to be prepared for disasters

Even though natural disasters have a devastating impact on everything that crosses their path, these events don’t affect everyone equally. Low-income people and racial/ethnic minority groups are most at risk for disaster exposure. According to a 2020 Health Affairs article, they are more likely to live in disaster-prone areas and reside in lower-quality housing.

Natural disasters also disproportionately impact older adults and people with disabilities. Mobility is often the key to maintaining safety, says Natalie Simpson, associate professor and chair of operations management and strategy at the University at Buffalo School of Management, which is an additional challenge for these demographics. 

For vulnerable groups, preparedness will come a long way in buffering the impact of disasters. However, not all people are capable of sufficient disaster preparedness.

A new study published in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction found that specific American households are less likely to be at least minimally prepared for disasters. These groups, including families with children, renters, homes led by women, and those of low socioeconomic status, are less likely to have the essential resources for immediate evacuation or sheltering for three days. Moreover, Asians and African Americans are less likely to have minimal disaster preparedness.

The authors investigated the factors associated with disaster preparedness by analyzing the data from the 2018 National Household Survey (NHS) by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The NHS began in 2007 and has been conducted annually since 2013 to understand how personal disaster preparedness in the US changes over time by investigating Americans’ attitudes and behaviors about it.

[Related: The world is on course to experience 560 major disasters each year.]

Lack of information about disaster preparedness is a critical factor that affects one’s capability (or lack thereof) to arrange for these circumstances, says Smitha Rao, study author and assistant professor at The Ohio State University College of Social Work. It’s important to get crucial details about disaster preparedness across and target communities that are more affected by disasters or are less prepared, she added.

The study also discussed how socio-cognitive factors affected disaster preparedness: Believing in the usefulness of disaster preparedness was associated with being at least adequately prepared. People with less confidence in their ability to be ready were less likely to be minimally prepared for an emergency.

“The dominant factor in anyone’s ability to minimally prepare for disaster is income level,” says Simpson. Low-income households struggle with keeping food on the table, while higher-income families are more likely to have insurance, evacuation plans, and personal vehicles. Recommended purchases for preparedness such as radios, generators, flashlights, and batteries also require surplus income, she adds.

One of the most important things an individual can do is talk about disaster preparedness with their family members and neighbors, like thinking of a plan and preparing a go-bag with essential items and documents, says Rao.

“We prepare for disaster to lessen its impact on our lives,” says Simpson. “We will never control disasters, but we do have some control over how much damage the next disaster leaves behind.”

The government plays a major role in disaster preparedness

According to Rao, some communities are less prepared not due to individual shortcomings but because they usually have other pressing needs that demand attention or lack the resources to take necessary action. She adds that governments and institutions can improve their disaster preparedness by providing information and comprehensive support and working closely with the most vulnerable groups. 

Policymakers should seek the best channels for disaster preparedness education, like teaching it at school or non-traditional partners like churches, says Simpson. People with internet access can visit Ready.gov, a website created by the US Department of Homeland Security, to make a plan and know what to prepare in case different kinds of disasters or emergencies occur.

“Governments need to recognize that lower income groups often live in particularly risky areas for disaster, with minimal or degraded infrastructure and even lax code enforcement,” she adds. “This is an inequity that can be corrected through greater investment, which basically shifts this important part of preparedness back to [the] government.” 

[Related: Our infrastructure can’t handle climate disasters. We need to build differently.]

Lawmakers can help low-income communities by investing in the necessary renovations and repairs on public housing, as well as replacing degraded and substandard infrastructure that makes living environments unsafe.

Living in urban areas also requires dependence on critical infrastructures, including transport, energy, telecommunications, and healthcare, that can fail catastrophically in a disaster. When these fail, they can send large numbers of people into a state of deprivation all at once, says Simpson. The New York City subway system—which has a daily ridership of about 5.5 million people—has faced flooding in the past due to hurricanes or heavy rains. 

Japan, a country geographically prone to disasters such as typhoons, tsunamis, and earthquakes, has one of the safest and most disaster-resilient built environments in the world. Architects and engineers use effective disaster-proofing practices, innovation, technology, and artificial intelligence when designing and constructing buildings to make them more resilient and minimize potential damage. The government also invests a lot of money into disaster preparedness by upgrading infrastructures, improving technologies, and adopting disaster reduction projects.

“While not all disasters are related to climate change, the climate crisis is definitely amplifying the impact and occurrence of many disasters,” says Rao. “Real climate action that holds climate justice principles central is the most urgent requirement from institutions and the government.”

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