Rogue monster waves, once believed extremely rare, are now statistically confirmed to occur “all the time” thanks to researchers’ new, artificial intelligence-aided analysis. Using a combined hundreds of years’ worth of information gleaned from over 1 billion wave patterns, scientists collaborating between the University of Copenhagen and the University of Victoria have produced an algorithmic equation capable of predicting the “recipe” for extreme rogue waves. In doing so, the team appear to also upend beliefs about oceanic patterns dating back to the 1700’s.

Despite centuries of terrifying, unconfirmed rumors alongside landlubber skepticism, monstrous rogue waves were only scientifically documented for the first time in 1995. But since laser measuring equipment aboard the Norwegian oil platform Draupner captured unimpeachable evidence of an encounter with an 85-foot-high wall of water, researchers have worked to study the oceanic phenomenon’s physics, characteristics, and influences. Over the following decade, oceanographers came to define a rogue wave as being at least twice the height of a formation’s “significant wave height,” or the mean of the largest one-third of a wave pattern. They also began confidently citing “some reasons” behind the phenomena, but knew there was much more to learn.

[Related: New AI-based tsunami warning software could help save lives.]

Nearly two decades after Draupner, however, researchers’ new, AI-assisted approach offers unprecedented analysis through a study published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Basically, it is just very bad luck when one of these giant waves hits,” Dion Häfner, a research engineer and the paper’s first author, said in a November 20 announcement. “They are caused by a combination of many factors that, until now, have not been combined into a single risk estimate.”

Using readings obtained from buoys spread across 158 locations near US coasts and overseas territories, the team first amassed information equivalent to 700 years’ worth of sea state information, wave heights, water depths, and bathymetric data. After mapping all the causal variables that influence rogue waves, Häfner and their colleagues used various AI methods to synthesize the data into a model capable of calculating rogue wave formation probabilities. (These included symbolic regression which generates an equation output rather than a single prediction.) Unfortunately, the results are unlikely to ease fears of anyone suffering from thalassophobia.

“Our analysis demonstrates that abnormal waves occur all the time,” Johannes Gemmrich, the study’s second author, said in this week’s announcement. According to Gemmrich, the team registered 100,000 dataset instances fitting the bill for rogue waves.

“This is equivalent to around 1 monster wave occurring every day at any random location in the ocean,” Gemmrich added, while noting they weren’t necessarily all “monster waves of extreme size.” A small comfort, perhaps.

Until the new study, many experts believed the majority of rogue waves formed when two waves combined into a single, massive mountain of water. Based on the new equation, however, it appears the biggest influence is owed to “linear superposition.” First documented in the 1700’s, such situations occur when two wave systems cross paths and reinforce one another, instead of combining. This increases the likelihood of forming massive waves’ high crests and deep troughs. Although understood to exist for hundreds of years, the new dataset offers concrete support for the phenomenon and its effects on wave patterns.

[Related: How Tonga’s volcanic eruption can help predict tsunamis.]

And while it’s probably disconcerting to imagine an eight-story-tall wave occurring somewhere in the world every single day, the new algorithmic equation can at least help you stay well away from locations where rogue waves are most likely to occur at any given time. This won’t often come in handy for the average person, but for the estimated 50,000 cargo ships daily sailing across the world, integrating the equation into their forecasting tools could save lives.

Knowing this, Häfner’s team has already made their algorithm, research, and amassed data available as open source information, so that weather services and public agencies can start identifying—and avoiding—any rogue wave-prone areas.

The post An equation co-written with AI reveals monster rogue waves form ‘all the time’ appeared first on Popular Science.

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No one can entirely predict where the artificial intelligence industry is taking everyone, but at least the AI is poised to reliably tell you what the weather will be like when you get there. (Relatively.) According to a paper published on November 14 in Science, a new, AI-powered 10-day climate forecasting program called GraphCast is already outperforming existing prediction tools nearly every time. The open-source technology is even showing promise for identifying and charting potentially dangerous weather events—all while using a fraction of the “gold standard” system’s computing power.

“Weather prediction is one of the oldest and most challenging–scientific endeavors,” GraphCast team member Remi Lam said in a statement on Tuesday. “Medium range predictions are important to support key decision-making across sectors, from renewable energy to event logistics, but are difficult to do accurately and efficiently.”

[Related: Listen to ‘Now and Then’ by The Beatles, a ‘new’ song recorded using AI.]

Developed by Lam and colleagues at Google DeepMind, the tech company’s AI research division, GraphCast is trained on decades of historic weather information alongside roughly 40 years of satellite, weather station, and radar reanalysis. This stands in sharp contrast to what are known as numerical weather prediction (NWP) models, which traditionally utilize massive amounts of data concerning thermodynamics, fluid dynamics, and other atmospheric sciences. All that data requires intense computing power, which itself requires intense, costly energy to crunch all those numbers. On top of all that, NWPs are slow—taking hours for hundreds of machines within a supercomputer to produce their 10-day forecasts.

GraphCast, meanwhile, offers highly accurate, medium range climatic predictions in less than a minute, all through just one of Google’s AI-powered machine learning tensor processing unit (TPU) machines.

During a comprehensive performance evaluation against the industry-standard NWP system—the High-Resolution Forecast (HRES)—GraphCast proved more accurate in over 90 percent of tests. When limiting the scope to only the Earth’s troposphere, the lowest portion of the atmosphere home to most noticeable weather events, GraphCast beat HRES in an astounding 99.7 percent of test variables. The Google DeepMind team was particularly impressed by the new program’s ability to spot dangerous weather events without receiving any training to look for them. By uploading a hurricane tracking algorithm and implementing it within GraphCast’s existing parameters, the AI-powered program was immediately able to more accurately identify and predict the storms’ path.

In September, GraphCast made its public debut through the organization behind HRES, the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). During that time, GraphCast accurately predicted Hurricane Lee’s trajectory nine days ahead of its Nova Scotia landfall. Existing forecast programs proved not only less accurate, but also only determined Lee’s Nova Scotia destination six days in advance.

[Related: Atlantic hurricanes are getting stronger faster than they did 40 years ago.]

“Pioneering the use of AI in weather forecasting will benefit billions of people in their everyday lives,” Lam wrote on Tuesday, who notes GraphCast’s potential vital importance amid increasingly devastating events stemming from climate collapse.

“[P]redicting extreme temperatures is of growing importance in our warming world,” Lam continued. “GraphCast can characterize when the heat is set to rise above the historical top temperatures for any given location on Earth. This is particularly useful in anticipating heat waves, disruptive and dangerous events that are becoming increasingly common.”

Google DeepMind’s GraphCast is already available via its open-source coding, and ECMWF plans to continue experimenting with integrating the AI-powered system into its future forecasting efforts.

The post Google DeepMind’s AI forecasting is outperforming the ‘gold standard’ model appeared first on Popular Science.

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One muggy day in July 1986, a news helicopter was recording footage of a festival in Minneapolis when the pilot and photographer glimpsed a tornado over nearby Brooklyn Park. They moved toward it, filming the powerful twister for 25 minutes, mesmerizing viewers watching it live on TV.

Watching as the helicopter hovered within maybe a half-mile of the twister was Robin Tanamachi, who was a kid growing up in Minneapolis at the time. “We were seeing all this really beautiful interior vortex structure,” she says. “I was just absolutely hooked on that, and I know I was not the only one.” Today, Tanamachi is a research meteorologist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, and one of many researchers delving into twisters’ mysteries, searching for details about their formation that may bolster future forecasts.

Tornadoes can be elusive research subjects. Through chasing storms and using computer simulations, scientists have worked out the basic ingredients needed to spin up a twister, but two crucial questions continue to vex them: Why do some thunderstorms form tornadoes while others don’t? And how exactly do tornadoes get their spin?

Despite the logistically and scientifically challenging nature of the work, scientists are motivated to keep trying: Tornadoes can kill dozens to hundreds of people in the United States every year and cause billions of dollars in damage. Now researchers are chasing the killer storms that spawn tornadoes with cutting-edge technology, flying drones into the storms and harnessing more computing power than ever to simulate them in search of answers.

“Today, we’re simulating the atmosphere with unprecedented spatial resolution. We’re observing storms with unprecedented temporal and spatial resolution,” says atmospheric scientist Howie Bluestein of the University of Oklahoma in Norman. “But there’s still a lot of problems and a lot of things that need to be solved.”

Scientists may be turning up new clues to tornado formation by studying what’s happening in the atmosphere around them and on the ground below them, and by comparing what they find in the field with new, higher-resolution models of the thunderstorms that generate them. Even as they chase these new leads, researchers are also trying to understand how climate change may affect when and where tornadoes form.

Chasing answers

Since scientists began studying tornadoes in earnest in the mid-20th century, they’ve put together a pretty good outline of the steps required to generate a twister. Most destructive tornadoes are spawned by supercell thunderstorms — giants that typically have a very tall cloud that widens into an anvil shape at the top. Supercells are characterized by a kilometers-wide rotating updraft called a mesocyclone that can last for hours. That rotation comes from wind shear, which sets wind nearer to the ground spinning horizontally like a spiraling football. These winds then become vertically oriented within an updraft like a spinning top.

A couple of things need to happen for a supercell to become tornadic: First, the giant mesocyclone at the heart of the storm needs to get air rotating closer to the ground. Then this vortex needs to be stretched upward. Stretching tightens the twister’s footprint, speeding its rotation, similar to what happens when figure skaters pull in their arms during a spin.

The first clues to the physics of tornadoes came from secondhand information and damage reports, as scientists tried to figure out what sorts of winds could blow down a barn or pluck a chicken, says Richard Rotunno, an atmospheric scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, and the author of an overview of the fluid dynamics of tornadoes in the 2013 Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics.

The construction of the Interstate Highway System in the 1950s created a grid across the flat Great Plains that allowed enterprising scientists to get out in front of storms and sometimes directly observe tornadoes. A big advance came with the development of Doppler radar for meteorology. By emitting pulses of energy and detecting the reflected signal, the technology captures information about wind and precipitation. Radar allowed the detection of mesocyclones, which became the basis for tornado forecasts and a boon for chasers, who would stop at payphones periodically to call the lab for the latest radar intel.

But radar doesn’t catch all the clues scientists are after—such as the invisible forces in a storm that get winds moving—so they turned to models that simulate the physics of storms, says atmospheric scientist Paul Markowski at Penn State University in University Park. “In a computer simulation, we have all of those forces.”

The first three-dimensional simulations of supercells were created in the 1970s, helping scientists study the structures of updrafts and downdrafts and how precipitation evolves. As models improved over time, they revealed that updrafts can turn rotating areas of air into the massive mesocyclones in supercells. The models also showed how thunderstorms in the Northern Hemisphere can split into a left and a right cell, with the right one more likely to result in severe weather. These models were finally reproducing behavior observed in actual supercells and providing hints to how areas of cooler air, called cold pools, might play into tornado formation by shortening the time it takes for a twister to develop.

These models had relatively coarse resolution, but as computational power increased, simulations started to capture more detail about supercells, and researchers also worked to realistically capture the effects of rain, snow and hail. Still, the resolution was on the order of hundreds of meters—far too large to catch tornadoes, which tend to be closer to 20 meters wide.

Radar also got better and faster, and researchers started taking it into the field on trucks. In 1994, a host of scientists hoping to understand where tornadoes got their rotation began a multiyear campaign named Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment, or VORTEX. They chased storms with all sorts of equipment, including sensor-loaded weather balloons, and instrumented cars that took temperature, pressure and wind measurements within supercells. But the scientists felt they needed further observations, leading to VORTEX-2 in 2009. “The big takeaway that we got from VORTEX-2 was that you can’t really tell whether a storm is going to be tornadic or non-tornadic just by how it looks on radar or what the weather balloons in its proximity show you,” Tanamachi says.

Other field campaigns followed, but scientists still haven’t definitively answered why some supercell thunderstorms create tornadoes while others don’t progress beyond a mesocyclone. Now they are looking to new strategies and tools to fill in the rest of the story.

Send in the drones

Despite the drama of a churning twister, the center of a tornado probably isn’t where the answers lie. “Getting something into the tornado—it makes for good television, but it actually doesn’t tell us a whole lot,” Markowski says. “It tells us that it’s windy there and the pressure is low.”

Instead, scientists are using new tools to glean clues from the environment that could help them sift the tornadic supercells from the non-tornadic. “Detailed data on the structure of the atmosphere—its temperature, pressure, wind—below cloud base is largely absent,” Rotunno says. Researchers are starting to fly drones into storms to capture these observations.

Drones can take detailed measurements at higher altitudes than cars. And unlike weather balloons, they can cross boundaries between areas of a storm with different pressure or air density. “The reason we think they’re important is because tornadoes tend to form on these boundaries,” says atmospheric scientist Adam Houston of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Houston and his colleagues have been pairing drone observations with radar and other techniques in the field as part of the TORUS project since 2019. Now Houston’s team is digging through the data, looking for trends across storms for hints about whether these relatively small features influence tornado formation.

Scientists are also gathering information on what’s going on near the ground where the tornado forms. Both modeling and observations have shown that this is where the highest speeds occur. How air interacts with the land surface—features such as hills and forests—may play a role in starting and intensifying twisters, but radar tends to miss at least the first hundred meters just above the ground because of the geometry of the beam. Atmospheric scientist Jana Houser of Ohio State University in Columbus is hoping to learn more about what’s going on in that gap.

Houser’s team chases storms, capturing radar measurements of a tornado’s size and intensity over time. Then they search for links between those data and the topography and roughness of the surface the storm has swept over. They’ve found that in most cases, changes in terrain affect the air getting sucked into the tornado and change the twister’s strength. This could be an important clue, but it’s proving difficult to puzzle out. “The problem,” Houser says, “is that sometimes the same type of occurrence in one case results in an intensification, and then in the next case, it results in a weakening.”

There may be a limit to how well researchers can understand and predict these storms, Markowski says. “When it comes tornadoes, I think we’re kind of butting up against chaos.” Perturbations that are so small they are essentially unmeasurable are everywhere in the atmosphere and may influence the formation of a tornado. Markowski and other scientists are starting to use machine learning to help better predict how these storms behave.

Finding the twist

Another big question has been swirling around twisters for decades: “We really don’t understand where the rotation that feeds the tornado ultimately comes from,” Houser says. The rotating air in a supercell’s mesocyclone is too high by the time it starts spinning vertically; the storms need additional rotation nearer to the ground to become tornadic. There are at least three hypotheses as to where this near-ground rotation comes from and, in any given twister, there may be multiple mechanisms at play, she says.

One hypothesis is based on how friction slows air moving near the ground. Air at higher altitudes moves faster and tumbles over the slower air and starts rolling like a barrel. The idea is that this rotating air could then be turned upright when it gets sucked into an updraft. Other hypotheses point to downdrafts related to precipitation and cooling air. The difference in density between cool air and neighboring warmer air can generate an air current that prompts spinning. Both observations and models have backed this idea and point to different areas of the storm where this may occur.

During either of these scenarios, there may also be many smaller pockets of swirling air that merge, combining into an area with enough rotation to get a tornado spinning. New support for this theory is emerging through higher-resolution storm simulations.

Most models working at coarser resolutions can’t actually see simulated tornadoes, inferring them instead based on areas of air with a lot of spin. Atmospheric scientist Leigh Orf of the University of Wisconsin-Madison has taken advantage of advances in supercomputing to build 10-meter-resolution models that can directly simulate tornadoes. At this scale, turbulence comes alive, Orf says. His models reveal how small areas of rotation could combine to kick off a tornado. “It fully resolves non-tornadic vortices that merge together in ways that are very compelling and I’ve never seen before,” he says.

Models can also provide hints of behavior to look for in the field. Orf’s models have helped him and his colleagues explore a feature they named the streamwise vorticity current, or SVC—a tail of swirling air off to the side of the storm that may amplify air rotation near the ground. Other scientists have now observed this feature in actual tornadic supercells.

Real-world observations don’t yet exist for the rotation mergers, but they may be coming. Plans to revamp the US radar system would employ a new generation of faster radar that can capture features that develop in a flash. “I am very confident that the things I’m seeing in the simulations will eventually be detected in the atmosphere, just like the SVC was,” Orf says.

High stakes

The landscape of tornado research has expanded from the Great Plains into the southeastern United States, driven by deadly storms and increasing tornado activity there. When a rash of tornadoes hit the region in 2011 starting in mid-April, more than 300 people were killed. “It was the largest outbreak on record since the super outbreak of 1974,” Tanamachi says. That motivated another campaign in 2015, VORTEX-SE, to study tornadoes there, but the work has proved difficult.

Not only do atmospheric conditions in the Southeast differ from the Great Plains, it’s also harder to observe twisters, Tanamachi’s team found. The hilly landscapes block views of storms, mucking up storm-chasing efforts. Instead, researchers have to forecast where a tornado might form and hunker down there. The one time this approach yielded a tornado sighting during VORTEX-SE, the radar was blocked by a stand of trees.

Much of what scientists have learned about tornadoes elsewhere doesn’t apply to the Southeast because many of the tornadoes that occur there are not seeded by supercells. Instead, they grow from a line of storms called a squall line. “We have no clue how these work,” says atmospheric scientist Johannes Dahl of Texas Tech University in Lubbock. While these tornadoes are typically weaker than those from supercells, they can still cause damage and death.

Despite the challenges, understanding tornadoes in the Southeast remains a priority, especially as tornado activity has kicked up in the region in the last four decades or so. It’s not clear yet if this is due to climate change or something else, such as the climate pattern known as El Niño, Dahl says. Still, researchers have started to see some trends related to climate. A look at 60 years of US tornado data revealed that while the number of tornadoes didn’t change, the number of days on which multiple twisters occur has increased. Climate change appears to be aiding some of the ingredients for tornadoes at the expense of others. But it seems that on a good day for tornadoes, the conditions are very favorable, Houser says.

With increasingly powerful models, a possible upgrade to the US radar system and the help of machine learning, researchers will continue in their quest to unveil the inner workings of tornadoes. “Although research in this area has been going on for decades,” Dahl says, “it always seems like there are surprises.”

Even after 20 years of studying tornadoes, Houser finds herself “giddy, excited” by the prospect of catching a tornado in action — ideally over a field where it isn’t destroying someone’s home. “There’s this weird dichotomy between the beauty that they have and the volatility and intensity and violence that they wreak,” Houser says. “They’re so mysterious.”

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews. Sign up for the newsletter.

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This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.

Hurricane Ian slammed into southwest Florida as a Category 4 storm in September last year, killing 149 people—the most deaths attributable to a single hurricane in the state in nearly a century. But the official death count didn’t include one of the most gruesome ways people died as a result of the storm.

A study published this week found that Hurricane Ian led to a spike in cases of vibriosis, a life-threatening illness caused by a water-borne bacteria called Vibrio, in Florida. In Lee County, where Ian made landfall, 38 people were sickened by the bacteria and 11 people ultimately died in the month following the storm — the highest number of Vibrio cases in a single month in Florida in more than 30 years. There had been no reported cases of Vibrio in the state in the week leading up to the hurricane. 

There are many species of Vibrio, including Vibrio cholerae—the cause of the diarrheal disease cholera, which kills tens of thousands of people per year in the Global South. Vibrio vulnificus, commonly referred to as “flesh-eating bacteria,” is less common globally but more deadly, and it’s becoming more pervasive in the U.S. Vibrio vulnificus kills an estimated 1 in 5 people who are exposed to it, usually either by eating uncooked shellfish or by making contact with the bacteria via an open wound. Three people died after consuming shellfish tainted by Vibrio vulnificus or otherwise being exposed to the bacteria in New York and Connecticut earlier this year. 

Past research has shown that warming ocean surface temperatures are leading to more Vibrio bacteria in the world’s oceans, particularly in the Atlantic, which is heating up at an alarming and unprecedented rate. A study published in Nature this year — the most comprehensive scientific assessment of how climate change is influencing the distribution of the bacteria to date — predicted that Vibrio vulnificus is likely to be present in every eastern U.S. state by the end of this century.   

The study published [last] week, led by Rita Colwell, a microbiologist at the University of Maryland and one of the foremost Vibrio researchers in the nation, is among the first to make a direct link between a specific hurricane and a spike in cases of vibriosis. Colwell and her colleagues found that flooding brought on by Hurricane Ian caused millions of gallons of water to run into the ocean, carrying nutrients with it. The storm also stirred up sediment and warm water off the coast of Florida. The runoff, sediment, and high sea-surface temperatures triggered an explosion of Vibrio vulnificus and other types of Vibrio bacteria in the waters off the Florida coast, growth the researchers were able to document using satellite observations and shellfish samples from October 2022. 

Gabriel Filippelli, a climate change researcher and director of Indiana University’s Environmental Resilience Institute, said he would have expected Hurricane Ian’s impacts to produce a “blip” in Vibrio abundance off Florida’s coast “and then a recovery back to baseline.” But that’s not what the study says happened. “It actually ramped up not only the abundance of Vibrio but some of the particular species that are problematic,” Filippelli, who was not involved in the research, said. 

Colwell wasn’t surprised by her findings—the ocean water around Florida was abnormally warm last year and has continued to warm since. Her own prior research has shown that temperature anomalies lead to the growth of these harmful bacteria. Warm water also breeds stronger hurricanes, and adding a storm to conditions that already favored Vibrio had a predictable outcome. “We took samples and, sure enough, we found lots of Vibrio,” Colwell said. 

The results, she said, signal that public health officials everywhere, but particularly in hurricane-prone states, need to be aware of the potential threat that Vibrio bacteria pose to their communities. Climate change continues to create conditions that are conducive to larger and more intense storms, which could mean more vibriosis in humans as time goes on. 

Filippelli hopes this study and other research to come will help local governments limit injuries and death during and after big storms. With the right data, local public health departments would be able to warn communities about the potential for toxins in shellfish and waterways following a hurricane or extreme flooding event. “That’s kind of the point of doing a lot of this,” Filippelli said. “It’s not just watching the climatic horror show emerge but trying to get ahead of it.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/health/hurricane-ian-stirred-up-flesh-eating-bacteria-in-florida/.

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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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 know 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 this year.

• 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 chose 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

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 and connect it to your WiFi network, 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

SEE IT

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 ensures any openings are downwards-facing, reducing the chances of clogging.

Unlike many 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

SEE IT

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

SEE IT

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 who 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 and 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

SEE IT

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 the 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 the best 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 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 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

• 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

Getting one of the best home weather stations means getting 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.

Why trust us

Popular Science started writing about technology more than 150 years ago. There was no such thing as “gadget writing” when we published our first issue in 1872, but if there was, our mission to demystify the world of innovation for everyday readers means we would have been all over it. Here in the present, PopSci is fully committed to helping readers navigate the increasingly intimidating array of devices on the market right now.

Our writers and editors have combined decades of experience covering and reviewing consumer electronics. We each have our own obsessive specialties—from high-end audio to video games to cameras and beyond—but when we’re reviewing devices outside of our immediate wheelhouses, we do our best to seek out trustworthy voices and opinions to help guide people to the very best recommendations. We know we don’t know everything, but we’re excited to live through the analysis paralysis that internet shopping can spur so readers don’t have to.

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The Pacific Ocean is a juggernaut. It’s the largest ocean on our planet, almost double the size of the Atlantic. Its vast expanse, exposure to trade winds, and range of temperatures makes it incredibly dynamic. All these factors contribute to create the El Niño—Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a climate pattern that affects seasonal precipitation, heat, storms, and more around the world. 

ENSO is made up of three stages: El Niño and La Niña, which can both increase the likelihood of extreme weather from the Philippines to Hawaii to Peru—and the neutral phase that we are typically in. El Niño is currently underway and is predicted to go strong until winter. With it come a slew of weather patterns like exacerbated heat waves in the northern US and Canada, increased risk of flooding in the south and southeast US, delayed rainy seasons, and even droughts in countries like Indonesia and the Philippines. And this is for an El Niño period that is predicted to be strong, but not particularly extreme. But as the Pacific warms due to human-driven climate change and temperature gradients across the ocean widen, scientists warn that El Niño and La Niña periods are becoming longer, more extreme, and more frequent.

[Related: Climate change is making the ocean lose its memory]

In one recent study published in the journal Nature Reviews, researchers looked at different climate models to see how ENSO has changed through the past century, and how it may shift in coming years. While El Niño and La Niña ordinarily last nine to 12 months, the vast majority of models predict that we will see them stretch out over multiple years. “In the 20th century you got about one extreme El Niño per 20 years,” says Wenju Cai, chief research scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia and lead author of the Nature Reviews paper. “But in the future, and in the 21st century on average, we will get something like one extreme event per 10 years—so it’s doubling.”

Longer and more intense periods of El Niño and La Niña mean that the risks of extreme weather—hurricanes, cyclones, flooding, drought—are heightened for most countries lying in the Pacific or flanking it. For example, El Niño pulls warm water farther east, so if tropical cycles (storms that tend to move westward) develop, they’ll have more time and distance to cover until they reach land. “While they’re traveling in the ocean, these tropical cyclones are energized by the heat and moisture from the ocean,” says Cai. By the time they reach countries to the west like North Korea, South Korea, Japan, or China, they could be more catastrophic than the tropical storms those places experience today.

Since “global warming is already making extreme events more extreme” like intensifying storms and weather patterns, Cai says, it’s a “double whammy.” 

But even the less dramatic effects of ENSO could still amount to damage. The fluctuations in ocean temperatures that ENSO brings, for example, can be dramatic and too quick for marine life like corals to adapt, says John Burns, a marine and data scientist at the University of Hawaii. “All that can exacerbate coral bleaching,” which has already been documented in Hawaiian reefs. 

And because creatures and systems are so intrinsically interconnected, this has resounding implications for a number of species and industries. Burns has created technologies that can reconstruct water habitats, and he’s used those models to study the implications of coral loss. “We’ve actually mathematically connected how these habitats influence the abundance of reef fish,” he says, “which are one of the primary sources of protein for the global economy, especially in Southeast Asia.” So not only will climate change and ENSO harm fish and fisheries, but that could also have ripple effects on tourism, as well as the local and global economies. 

In a recent report in the journal Science, climate researchers from Dartmouth College estimated that extreme El Niño events from 1982 and 1997 alone cost the global economy about $4 trillion to $6 trillion, respectively, in the following years. The authors also estimated that this current El Niño period could rack up $3 trillion in losses over the next five years. The damages aren’t just limited to buildings and infrastructure, Cai says: They include social pillars people may not even consider, like jobs, farmland, food stocks, and individual health. As a result, some countries and organizations are taking a proactive approach against El Niño. Peru, for instance, is dedicating more than $1 billion to prevent and contain the carnage it might bring.

[Related: The Pacific heat blob’s aftereffects are still warping ocean ecosystems]

But there is time to bring ENSO and the Pacific Ocean back into balance, bit by bit. While it can be useful at times to consider these global changes on a large scale, it’s important to “recognize that solutions will be very locally based,” says Burns. Even if we project the overall trends, he explains, understanding how specific habitats will be affected and what solutions are feasible requires local and native wisdom and knowledge. 

“It’s a shame if we get dismayed by these larger-scale changes and come to a conclusion of ‘there’s nothing we can do,’” Burns says. “It’s definitely not that simple … and we need strategies that are place-based to protect these systems.”

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A team of scientists and volunteers from the University of Reading in England recovered and digitized weather data from several ships that were bombed during the attack on Pearl Harbor in World War II. This nearly century-old data is offering clues how the war changed daily weather observations at the time.

When the US naval base was attacked on December 7, 1941 by Japanese military forces, over 100 vessels were stationed there. During the initial attack, the USS Arizona and USS Oklahoma sank and the USS Nevada beached after being hit by a torpedo and at least six bombs. Most of the remaining vessels from the fleet eventually returned to service and the crew members resumed recording weather data among their other daily duties.

[Related: The Rise Of The Tank Before World War II.]

The paper published September 18 in the Geoscience Data Journal describes how weather data from WWII was recovered from 19 United States Navy ships. Some earlier research has suggested these years were abnormally warm, and this new dataset of over 630,000 records with more than 3 million individual observations, is helping piece together the mystery referred to as the WWII warm anomaly.

These newly recovered datasets show how wartime created changes in observation practices, including taking more of them during the day rather than at night to avoid being detected by enemy ships. Due to this shift in when the measurements were taken, the team believes that collecting weather data only during daylight hours may have led to the slightly warmer temperatures recorded during the war. Future studies with this newly digitized data will help resolve if the weather truly was warmer during 1941 to 1945 and fill in gaps that will help scientists better understand how the global climate has evolved since the 1940s.

“Disruptions to trade routes in World War II led to a significant reduction in marine weather observations,” University of Reading meteorological research scientist and study co-author Praveen Teleti said in a statement. “Until recently, records from that time were still only available in classified paper documents. The scanning and rescuing of this data provides a window into the past, allowing us to understand how the world’s climate was behaving during a time of tremendous upheaval.“

In the study, the team used recovered logbooks from 19 different vessels, including battleships, aircraft carriers, destroyers, and cruisers. Many of these ships were present during the attack in December 1941 that killed 2,404 US military servicemembers and civilians, along with 64 Japanese servicemembers. All of the ships in this study saw some combat in the Pacific at some point during the war. The USS Pennsylvania remained in service after being hit during the attack, when one bomb fell on the battleship killing nine servicemembers. The USS Tennessee was bombed twice in December 1941, killing five servicemembers. The 32,300-ton battleship returned to service in February 1942. 

[Related: Severe droughts are bringing archaeological wonders and historic horrors to the surface.]

Additionally, over 4,000 volunteers transcribed more than 29,000 logbook images from the fleet stationed in Hawaii from 1941 through 1945 to generate the dataset.

“There are two sets of people we need to thank for making this mission a success. We are very grateful to the global team of citizen scientists for transcribing these observations and creating a huge dataset that includes millions of entries about air and sea surface temperatures, atmospheric pressure, wind speed, and wind direction,” said Teleti. “The greatest respect must go to the brave servicemen who recorded this data. War was all around them, but they still did their jobs with such professionalism. It is thanks to their dedication and determination that we have these observations 80 years on.”

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This article was originally featured on High Country News.

Marin Hambley was working as a groundskeeper in Chico, California, when the first plumes of what would become the deadliest fire in the state’s history appeared on the horizon. It was Nov. 8, 2018.

Initially, all Hambley could see of the Camp Fire was a “little puff of cloud”—a sight not uncommon in the northeastern reaches of the Sacramento Valley, where summer temperatures routinely surpass 100 degrees Fahrenheit. But by midafternoon, “the sky was totally black and just dropping chunks of ash,” said Hambley. 

Many residents evacuated; Hambley chose to stay. This area had been heavily impacted by the opioid crisis, and Hambley’s experience with harm reduction, a practice centered on minimizing the negative outcomes of drug use, made them acutely aware of the need to help people with substance abuse disorders. Additionally, their perspective as a queer and trans person led them to believe that they could be especially helpful to the marginalized populations that are often overlooked during disasters. 

Since 2006, Butte County, where Paradise and Chico are located, has consistently been among the top three counties in the state for hospitalizations from opioid-related overdoses, with an annual rate between 2.75 and 5 times the state’s average. 

In the hours after the plumes first appeared, Hambley heard about a pop-up encampment in an empty lot wedged between a busy throughway and the local Walmart. Hundreds of mostly low-income people had flocked there, fleeing the fire, and community organizers were distributing food, water and clothing. Meanwhile, those with means stayed in hotel rooms and Airbnbs or left the area entirely. 

At the time, the county lacked official harm reduction infrastructure. Hambley and other organizers had to locate and distribute supplies on their own. Without the required certification, their activities weren’t technically legal, but Hambley said that was a risk they were willing to take. While the group had received a grant for purchasing Narcan—the overdose-preventing nasal spray approved for over-the-counter use last March—they had to obtain syringes, needles, cotton swabs and fentanyl test strips from groups elsewhere in the state. “We were all kind of underground,” Hambley said, noting that they smuggled backpacks stuffed with Narcan into Red Cross-operated shelters, where drug use was prohibited, though widely practiced. 

At the Walmart encampment and other shelters, Hambley witnessed a disturbing rise in overdoses following the colossal Camp Fire, which ultimately killed at least 85 people and devoured nearly 240 square miles. A local paramedic noted that in the weeks following the fire, overdoses went from being a weekly occurrence to a daily one. And with a rate of 17 deaths per 100,000 residents, for the first time the Paradise area experienced a higher rate of opioid-related overdose deaths in 2018 than any other zip code in Butte County. Hambley said that’s because disasters cause both acute stress and chronic uncertainty, which can lead to more reactive and less managed drug use. “The chaos around you often precedes more chaotic (drug) use,” they said.

Across the Western U.S., climate disasters compound the devastation already caused by the deepening addiction crisis. Wildfires and floods breed anxiety, despair and isolation, all of which can exacerbate substance use. “Your house burns down, your community burns down, your school burns down—of course, you look for an escape,” said Sarah Windels, a co-founder of Bridge, a California-based program that promotes access to substance-use disorder treatment.

Beyond that, climate disasters halt addiction treatment programs and derail critical medication supply chains—all factors that heighten the risk of overdose, including for people who legally use opioids. This is especially true in rural areas, where fewer health-care providers are available, and patients often need to travel substantial distances to receive care. After a massive fire or flood, when local pharmacies and clinics may be closed, a person who is prescribed opioids for chronic pain or who is undergoing medication-assisted treatment (MAT) to curb their addiction may be forced to acquire a substitute illegally. If that supply has a higher potency than they are used to or, as is increasingly common, is laced with fentanyl, that individual is at a high risk of overdosing. 

“Your house burns down, your community burns down, your school burns down — of course, you look for an escape.”

The data suggests that the connection between climate-induced disasters and overdoses is neither occasional nor individual, but seasonal and increasingly predictable. For instance, overdose rates are increasing every year across the nation, but in California, at least, they peak at the height of fire season. According to the California Overdose Surveillance Dashboard, emergency department visits for opioid-related overdoses have topped out during the third quarter of every year since 2018. And in 2020, the counties most affected by the vast August Complex Fire saw a surge in overdose deaths while the wildfire burned. 

From the foothills of the California Sierras, to the floodplains of New Mexico, to the high Rockies in Colorado, these events are also forcing harm reduction workers to adapt their approaches to match their specific surroundings. 

In Albuquerque, New Mexico, for example, extreme weather during the summer months accelerates overdose rates, said Ashley Charzuk, the executive director of the New Mexico Harm Reduction Collaborative, although the reasons differ from those in regions affected by wildfires. In Charzuk’s experience, people who use intravenous drugs can find veins more easily when it’s hot, owing to vasodilation, and this can lead to more frequent and potent use. What’s more, those who use stimulants are at greater risk of overamping, which is different from overdosing. “Your body temperature goes up when you’re using methamphetamine,” said Charzuk. When paired with high environmental temperatures, Charzuk said, overamping can lead to heart attack, stroke or other complications.

As heat waves get more extreme, Charzuk and her colleagues prioritize educating people about the risks of drug use when it’s hot out. 

“We remind people … that heat plays into so many different metabolic factors,” said Charzuk. “If you’ve been out in the heat all day and you’ve been sweating, then you are going to be dehydrated, and anything that impacts your body like that is going to give you less of a defense.” 

In 2020, overdose-related emergency room visits in New Mexico peaked in July at 255, and in 2021, they peaked in June at 260.

As someone who uses drugs and has experienced homelessness in the past, Charzuk has “met some of the same challenges that (program) participants meet on a daily basis,” she said. 

Harm reduction workers are also at risk. In the summer of 2021, while handing out water in a local park, Charzuk was overcome by symptoms of heat stroke that kept her out of the field for days. “I feel like I learned a little bit more on how to take care of the people that are on my team as well as myself,” she said. 

For Hambley, such incidents speak to how important it is for harm reduction workers to think about their own physical and mental health during crises, “or else everyone will burn out,” they said. 

That tension came to a head for Arianna Campbell in the summer of 2021, when the Caldor Fire threatened to raze her community in Placerville, California, 90 miles southeast of Chico. As the flames approached, Campbell’s husband, a retired firefighter, suggested Campbell pack a go box. It was the first time he had ever done so. 

“He had some indications that this was going to be a very big one,” said Campbell; in fact, the fire would go on to burn over 200,000 acres and more than 1,000 buildings. 

But Campbell, a physician assistant, knew that she would be needed at the local hospital. Crises like wildfires strain emergency departments, Campbell explained, which are flooded by people with injuries, respiratory problems or other medical issues. This is especially likely for those who lack stable housing or have a substance use disorder. “If you’re someone who uses drugs, you may not necessarily have a lot of options,” Campbell said. 

In Placerville, Campbell helped her hospital become one of the country’s first rural sites to offer buprenorphine, a medication that helps curb opioid addiction. “If someone is being treated on buprenorphine and there is a lapse in treatment, they are at close to three times the risk of dying,” she said, “because it puts them at such high risk of return to use and overdose.”

Maggie Seldeen, who describes herself as a practicing drug user, founded High Rockies Harm Reduction to address the dearth of safe injection supplies in the region surrounding Aspen, Colorado. Overdoses from opioids, most notably fentanyl, have skyrocketed in the state since the start of the pandemic. For Seldeen—who used cocaine and heroin intravenously for years, starting as a freshman in high school, and who has seen numerous friends contract hepatitis—practicing harm reduction through the use of clean needles and fresh syringes is critically important. But more frequent wildfires and landslides affected the area’s already strained supply chain. 

“A lot of people of color, a lot of queer and trans folks, a lot of poor folks already understand the ways the system fails them.” 

That puts the lives of people who use drugs at risk, she said. In 2020, for instance, the Grizzly Creek Fire meant that I-70 in Glenwood Canyon—45 miles north of Aspen, and a critical juncture on the route from Aspen to Denver, more than a three-hour drive away—was closed for two weeks.  

“It gets really scary,” said Seldeen, who spoke about how the anxiety provoked by wildfires can push her and others to use substances as coping mechanisms. 

Now, Seldeen always has a go bag in her car when she is in the field in the summer months. It holds important personal documents, water, Narcan and first aid supplies, in case she encounters people who need help using drugs safely or reversing an overdose during an evacuation. Her hope is to create a network of people in the Rockies who are knowledgeable about—and prepared for—reducing the risks of drug use. Those connections, she says, will become increasingly important in a future that involves more climate events.

Seldeen isn’t alone in seeing the importance of community in facing the dueling crises of addiction and climate change. Back in Chico, Hambley now chairs the Northern Valley Harm Reduction Coalition, which Hambley helped grow in the wake of the Camp Fire, determined to continue the collective approach to harm reduction that came out of that disaster. “This is a community response,” they said. “The networks that we have are strong.” 

The embers of the Camp Fire had barely cooled in March 2020, when the Chico network had to mobilize once again to prevent overdoses during the statewide COVID-19 lockdown.

“This is a marathon,” Hambley said, explaining how their queer identity and personal experience living on the margins have given them the tools to build a community that will rise to the challenge. 

“A lot of people of color, a lot of queer and trans folks, a lot of poor folks already understand the ways the system fails them,” Hambley said. “As a queer trans person, I’ve already learned how to create family and community and networks outside of my home. Those are skills I live with every day, so in moments of crisis, our skill sets actually become incredibly valuable.”   

Robin Buller is a freelance journalist based in Oakland, California. She writes about health, equity and climate. Email her at robinmbuller@gmail.com.

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About 22 million Americans live in mobile homes or manufactured housing, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and as the housing crisis continues to worsen in places like Arizona, California, and New York, that number could go up.

But for some, mobile homes conjure up an image of rusting metal units in weed-choked lots, an unfair stereotype that has real consequences—advocates argue that mobile homes are not only a housing fix but could also help with the climate crisis.

According to Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, mobile homes are a good solution with a bad reputation. 

It’s unfair, he said, because the residents of mobile homes are often hampered by restrictive zoning laws that make it hard to upgrade maintenance and care of the structures. These zoning laws also have put communities at risk for climate-related disasters, which explains why so many mobile home parks are in floodplains.

“It’s not the home itself that often makes mobile homes vulnerable,” said Rumbach. “It’s actually the fact that we sort of stuck the poor away in these places that makes them vulnerable.” 

A report by the Niskanen Center, a nonprofit public policy organization, echoes Rumbach’s research. The report found that mobile homes have consistently been an affordable and underutilized solution that meets the housing needs of low- and moderate-income people.

Newer models can also be a low-carbon solution as these prefabricated homes, which are built in large pieces for easy assembly, can include things like heat pumps and solar panels, in contrast to older models that relied on propane or natural gas. Older models can also be eligible for retrofits to make them more energy efficient and climate-friendly. 

“They’re a pretty terrific solution,” said Rumbach. “Unfortunately, by law, in many places in the country [mobile homes] are not allowed to be placed anymore because there is such a cultural stigma.”

The Eastern Coachella Valley in California is one place where mobile home parks and residents have been consistently overlooked by public officials. People in the majority Latino area grapple with getting access to necessities like electricity and clean water. Arsenic was found in the water supply and is a persistent issue.

But despite that, there is also an incredible sense of community among the residents of informal mobile home parks in the area, according to Jovana Morales-Tilgren, a housing policy coordinator at Leadership Council for Justice and Accountability, a California nonprofit focusing on underserved rural communities. 

The parks were originally built for migrant farmworkers and today they operate without a permit, which means federal agencies and local governments don’t have official recognition that they exist. So if there’s a disaster, that makes it harder to get federal relief, and if there is a municipal upgrade, it doesn’t happen in those communities.

“They do have a lot more issues than regular mobile home parks,” said Morales-Tilgren. “Many of them don’t have weatherization, insulation. Many were built more than 20, 30, 40 years ago. And so they do have a lot of issues.” 

Mobile homes can be roughly categorized into two sections: older homes that predate the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s rules in 1976, and newer, prefabricated homes that often are greener, more efficient, and better functioning than some traditional homes. 

When Tropical Storm Hilary hit Southern California last month, residents in the unpermitted mobile home parks were trapped, because a power outage meant that residents had to sleep in their cars to get access to air conditioning. 

“[Mobile homes] are not equipped to handle those extreme weather events,” said Morales-Tilgren. 

This is especially an issue because a large portion of people that live in the area are low-income people of color who are undocumented, according to Morales-Tilgren. Consequently, people lack access to resources needed to recover from large flooding events like the kind that Hilary brought.

Another key issue: Mobile home parks, both permitted and unpermitted, are reliant on their own infrastructure. In other types of housing, such as apartments or single family homes, a municipality is usually in charge of providing electricity, water, sewage, and tree maintenance. But in mobile home parks, residents are reliant on owners to provide those services.

In addition, once extreme weather happens, residents are often caught in the grip of the confusing bureaucracy of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA. While mobile home parks can vary wildly, the main distinction that the agency makes is whether or not people own or rent the land underneath the home. 

A 2021 study published in the journal Frontiers found that there are numerous barriers to accessing resources, such as money from FEMA, for vulnerable populations in the wake of a flood-related disaster. Affordable housing units were affected more, and often the number of units did not bounce back to pre-disaster levels.

Additionally, mobile home residents are often at risk of being evicted in the aftermath of disasters that might displace them from their homes. This can fuel housing instability because mobile homes tend to be located in climate-vulnerable areas like floodplains, according to Rumbach. 

“Around the country, you see a disproportionate amount of mobile homes located in hazardous areas,” said Rumbach. “The demand is being driven by a segment of the housing market that’s looking for lower costs. And as a result, you see a lot of manufactured housing being placed into relatively climate-vulnerable places, because that land tends to be a little bit less valuable.”

On the other side of the country, though, mobile home owners in Ithaca, New York, have been the beneficiaries of a pilot project aimed at retrofitting mobile homes in the area to be more climate-friendly. 

This first-of-its-kind project is giving owners funding for heat pumps to replace the polluting natural gas or propane furnaces needed to heat mobile homes. The program also provides money to cover the cost of insulation needed to keep the heating and cooling provided by electric appliances in the home and reduce electric bills. 

Gay Nicholson, president of Sustainable Finger Lakes, a nonprofit focused on climate solutions in upstate New York, says that while their program, which is ongoing, has so far been successful in helping people access funding, they still are limited in their reach. The program would need more money as well as guidance from state and federal authorities to be able to meet the needs of everyone who applied.

Nicholson said that currently, the program is trying to help people transition off of natural gas, which is available cheaply despite its destructive climate impacts. This often puts the onus on consumers to be able to invest in climate-friendly technology, if no additional funding is available.

Cost is a vital aspect of upgrading mobile homes: “It affects how people make decisions,” said Nicholson. “Whether or not they’re going to stay on gas and stick to another cheap gas furnace.” 

Stigma surrounding mobile home parks is a huge reason for issues regarding resource allocation and zoning issues. Additionally, some of the most pressing issues come from a common problem for almost all mobile home residents: They’re just not considered. 

In Ithaca, that means many transmission lines that service mobile home parks are capped at a certain wattage that is far below what it would take to electrify them, which provides challenges for Nicholson. 

“There are no incentives set up by the state or the feds to help to pay a mobile home park owner to upgrade the electrical capacity of his park,” said Nicholson. “We’re way behind schedule for electrification.”

Back in California, in the Eastern Coachella Valley, this means that not only did Tropical Storm Hilary flood mobile home parks but that the roads were closed — further isolating residents. In this case, as in others such as in Texas in 2021, large-scale efforts to avoid the impacts of a disaster such as a hurricane or a cold snap do not consider mobile home residents and owners. 

This is a problem, according to Zachary Lamb, a professor at the college of environmental design at the University of California, Berkeley, because not being considered makes it difficult to be resilient to climate change. 

“Mobile home parks are disproportionately located in parts of landscapes that are vulnerable to climate risks,” said Lamb. “So they’re disproportionately located in floodplains. They’re disproportionately located in places that are exposed to extreme heat. …They’re also disproportionately located in places that are close to other environmental harms.” 

Despite those vulnerabilities, past research shows that in areas where marginalized communities live, people can and do come together to solve issues collaboratively. This makes one of the most misunderstood forms of housing a good place to invest in, according to Lamb.

“Making investments in climate resilience, that is such a no-brainer,” said Lamb. “In terms of both improving the infrastructure quality, and also in terms of giving residents more agency and more control over their communities.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/solutions/mobile-homes-could-be-a-climate-solution/. 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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Studies increasingly show that changing weather patterns, extreme heat, and unpredictable storms are likely to pop up pretty much everywhere on the globe. According to recent research, it turns out that 98 percent of the world’s population has been exposed to higher-than-normal temperatures made twice more likely by carbon dioxide pollution.

The new findings come from a report from US-based climate research group Climate Central and follow reports that this summer has been the hottest three-month period recorded, and July alone was the hottest month on record. 

The latest report utilizes Climate Central’s Climate Shift Index (CSI), which reveals how much climate change influences the temperature on any given day on the globe—so a level of 5 would mean this event was five times more likely to occur because of climate change. According to their findings, nearly half of the world’s population experienced at least 30 days between June and August with a CSI of at least 3. This means that the 30 or more days of extreme weather were made three times more likely due to climate change. 

[Related: July 2023 was likely the hottest month in 120,000 years.]

At least 1.5 billion people (or around one in every five people) saw at least this level of climate-change induced heat every single day during this time period. 

“In every country we could [analyze], including the southern hemisphere, where this is the coolest time of year, we saw temperatures that would be difficult—and in some cases nearly impossible—without human-caused climate change,” Andrew Pershing, Climate Central’s vice president for science, told Reuters.

Of course, not all locations saw the same amount of impact—79 countries in particular experienced at least half of their summer days at CSI level 3 or higher. Over half of these were UN-designated least developed (based on income thresholds, health and education indices, as well as economic and environmental vulnerabilities) countries and small island developing states. These countries typically contribute very little to climate change itself, in this case, culminating around 7 percent of total GHG emissions, according to the report. They also are at higher risk of climate-related disasters and still struggle to access funding to take mitigating measures. 

“In every place, if you start to push it beyond the temperatures that people experience on a regular basis, that’s dangerous heat because you’re not prepared for it physiologically. You’re not prepared for it in terms of your infrastructure,” Pershing told Scientific American.

[Related: US climate efforts look promising, but there’s more to do.]

Meanwhile, greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise year after year, and major fossil fuel companies and emitters have made minimal progress or backtracked on climate goals. As fossil fuel use continues to rise, so do their climate-warming emissions. 

“Breaking heat records has become the norm in 2023,” Friederike Otto, a senior lecturer in climate science at Imperial College London, said in a statement. “Global warming continues because we have not stopped burning fossil fuels. It is that simple.” 

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A new report from the United Nations World Meteorological Organization (WMO) found that Earth just experienced its hottest series of three months in a row on record. The data from the European Union-funded Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) found that global sea surface temperatures remained at “unprecedented highs” for the third month in a row.

[Related: July 2023 was likely the hottest month in 120,000 years.]

“Our planet has just endured a season of simmering—the hottest summer on record. Climate breakdown has begun. Scientists have long warned what our fossil fuel addiction will unleash,” United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said in a statement. “Surging temperatures demand a surge in action. Leaders must turn up the heat now for climate solutions. We can still avoid the worst of climate chaos – and we don’t have a moment to lose.”

So far, 2023 is the second warmest year on record behind 2016,—a powerful El Niño year. The planet officially began an El Niño pattern in June, which can bring extreme temperatures and flooding worldwide. A report issued in May from the WMO warned that the warming pattern could temporarily heat the planet by 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit.

August 2023 was the hottest month on record and the second hottest month after July 2023, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service ERA 5 dataset. As a whole, the month of August is estimated to have been around 2.7 degrees warmer than the preindustrial average for 1850-1900. 

Global monthly average sea surface temperatures were also the highest on record in August at 69.7 degrees. These temperatures exceeded the previous record set in March 2016 for every single day in August.

In Antarctica, sea ice extent (or coverage) is also at a record low level for this time of year, when the continent is experiencing its winter months. It is 12 percent below average, making for  the largest negative anomaly for August since satellite observations began in the late 1970s according to the WMO. This lack of sea ice can have devastating effects on Emperor penguins and other animals who live and breed in the region. 

On the opposite side of the planet in the Arctic, sea ice coverage was 10 percent below average, but still well above the record minimum set in August 2012.

[Related: July’s extreme heat waves ‘virtually impossible’ without climate change.]

“Eight months into 2023, so far we are experiencing the second warmest year to date, only fractionally cooler than 2016, and August was estimated to be around 1.5°C warmer than pre-industrial levels,” Carlo Buontempo, Director of the C3S’s  European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, said in a statement. “What we are observing, not only new extremes but the persistence of these record-breaking conditions, and the impacts these have on both people and planet, are a clear consequence of the warming of the climate system.”

Summer 2023 will likely be one for the history books, with massive heat domes breaking temperature records throughout the southern United States, devastating flooding in Vermont and other parts of the Northeast, extreme temperatures fueling hurricanes in the exceedingly warm Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico, and a record wildfire season in Canada. Europe has also seen record breaking heat waves as the planet continues to see the effects of climate change.

“It is worth noting that this is happening BEFORE we see the full warming impact of the El Niño event, which typically plays out in the second year after it develops,”  WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said in a statement. 

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This article is from a partnership that includes WBUR, NPR, and KFF Health News.

An important email appeared in the inboxes of a small group of health care workers north of Boston as this summer started. It warned that local temperatures were rising into the 80s.

An 80-plus-degree day is not sizzling by Phoenix standards. Even in Boston, it wasn’t high enough to trigger an official heat warning for the wider public.

But research has shown that those temperatures, coming so early in June, would likely drive up the number of heat-related hospital visits and deaths across the Boston region.

The targeted email alert the doctors and nurses at Cambridge Health Alliance in Somerville, Massachusetts, got that day is part of a pilot project run by the nonprofit Climate Central and Harvard University’s Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment, known as C-CHANGE.

Medical clinicians based at 12 community-based clinics in seven states — California, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin — are receiving these alerts.

At each location, the first email alert of the season was triggered when local temperatures reached the 90th percentile for that community. In a suburb of Portland, Oregon, that happened on May 14 during a springtime heat wave. In Houston, that occurred in early June.

A second email alert went out when forecasts indicated the thermometer would reach the 95th percentile. For Cambridge Health Alliance primary care physician Rebecca Rogers, that second alert arrived on July 6, when the high hit 87 degrees.

The emails remind Rogers and other clinicians to focus on patients who are particularly vulnerable to heat. That includes outdoor workers, older adults, or patients with heart disease, diabetes, or kidney disease.

Other at-risk groups include youth athletes and people who can’t afford air conditioning, or who don’t have stable housing. Heat has been linked to complications during a pregnancy as well.

“Heat can be dangerous to all of us,” said Caleb Dresser, director of health care solutions at C-CHANGE. “But the impacts are incredibly uneven based on who you are, where you live, and what type of resources you have.”

The pilot program aims to remind clinicians to start talking to patients about how to protect themselves on dangerously hot days, which are happening more frequently because of climate change. Heat is already the leading cause of death in the U.S. from weather-related hazards, Dresser said. Letting clinicians know when temperatures pose a particular threat to their patients could save lives.

“What we’re trying to say is, ‘You really need to go into heat mode now,’” said Andrew Pershing, vice president for science at Climate Central, with a recognition that “it’s going to be more dangerous for folks in your community who are more stressed.”

“This is not your grandmother’s heat,” said Ashley Ward, who directs the Heat Policy Innovation Hub at Duke University. “The heat regime that we are seeing now is not what we experienced 10 or 20 years ago. So we have to accept that our environment has changed. This might very well be the coolest summer for the rest of our lives.”

The alerts bumped heat to the forefront of Rogers’ conversations with patients. She made time to ask each person whether they can cool off at home and at work.

That’s how she learned that one of her patients, Luciano Gomes, works in construction.

“If you were getting too hot at work and maybe starting to feel sick, do you know some things to look out for?” Rogers asked Gomes.

“No,” said Gomes slowly, shaking his head.

Rogers told Gomes about early signs of heat exhaustion: dizziness, weakness, or profuse sweating. She handed Gomes tip sheets she’d printed out after receiving them  along with the email alerts.

They included information about how to avoid heat exhaustion and dehydration, as well as specific guidance for patients with asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), dementia, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and mental health concerns.

Rogers pointed out a color chart that ranges from pale yellow to dark gold. It’s a sort of hydration barometer, based on the color of one’s urine.

“So if your pee is dark like this during the day when you’re at work,” she told Gomes, “it probably means you need to drink more water.”

Gomes nodded. “This is more than you were expecting to talk about when you came to the doctor today, I think,” she said with a laugh.

During this visit, an interpreter translated the visit and information into Portuguese for Gomes, who is from Brazil and quite familiar with heat. But he now had questions for Rogers about the best ways to stay hydrated.

“Because here I’ve been addicted to soda,” Gomes told Rogers through the interpreter. “I’m trying to watch out for that and change to sparkling water. But I don’t have much knowledge on how much I can take of it.”

“As long as it doesn’t have sugar, it’s totally good,” Rogers said.

Now Rogers creates heat mitigation plans with each of her high-risk patients. But she still has medical questions that the research doesn’t yet address. For example: If patients take medications that make them urinate more often, could that lead to dehydration when it’s hot? Should she reduce their doses during the warmest weeks or months? And, if so, by how much? Research has yielded no firm answers to those questions.

Deidre Alessio, a nurse practitioner at Cambridge Health Alliance, also has received the email alerts. She has patients who sleep on the streets or in tents and search for places to cool off during the day.

“Getting these alerts makes me realize that I need to do more homework on the cities and towns where my patients live,” she said, “and help them find transportation to a cooling center.”

Most clinics and hospitals don’t have heat alerts built into electronic medical records, don’t filter patients based on heat vulnerability, and don’t have systems in place to send heat warnings to some or all of their patients.

“I would love to see health care institutions get the resources to staff the appropriate outreach,” said Gaurab Basu, a Cambridge Health Alliance physician who co-directs the Center for Health Equity Advocacy and Education at Cambridge Health Alliance. “But hospital systems are still really strained by covid and staffing issues.”

This pilot program is an excellent start and could benefit by including pharmacists, said Kristie Ebi, founding director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the University of Washington.

Ebi has studied heat early-warning systems for 25 years. She says one problem is that too many people don’t take heat warnings seriously. In a survey of Americans who experienced heat waves in four cities, only about half of residents took precautions to avoid harm to their health.

“We need more behavioral health research,” she said, “to really understand how to motivate people who don’t perceive themselves to be at risk, to take action.”

For Ebi and other researchers, the call to action is not just to protect individual health, but to address the root cause of rising temperatures: climate change.

“We’ll be dealing with increased exposure to heat for the rest of our lives,” said Dresser. “To address the factors that put people at risk during heat waves, we have to move away from fossil fuels so that climate change doesn’t get as bad as it could.”

This article is from a partnership that includes WBUR, NPR, and KFF Health News.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

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This article is republished from The Conversation.

Not only people need to stay cool, especially in a summer of record-breaking heat waves. Many machines, including cellphones, data centers, cars and airplanes, become less efficient and degrade more quickly in extreme heat. Machines generate their own heat, too, which can make hot temperatures around them even hotter.

We are engineering researchers who study how machines manage heat and ways to effectively recover and reuse heat that is otherwise wasted. There are several ways extreme heat affects machines.

No machine is perfectly efficient – all machines face some internal friction during operation. This friction causes machines to dissipate some heat, so the hotter it is outside, the hotter the machine will be.

Cellphones and similar devices with lithium ion batteries stop working as well when operating in climates above 95 degrees Farenheit (35 degrees Celsius) – this is to avoid overheating and increased stress on the electronics.

Cooling designs that use innovative phase-changing fluids can help keep machines cool, but in most cases heat is still ultimately dissipated into the air. So, the hotter the air, the harder it is to keep a machine cool enough to function efficiently.

Plus, the closer together machines are, the more dissipated heat there will be in the surrounding area.

Deforming materials

Higher temperatures, either from the weather or the excess heat radiated from machinery, can cause materials in machinery to deform. To understand this, consider what temperature means at the molecular level.

At the molecular scale, temperature is a measure of how much molecules are vibrating. So the hotter it is, the more the molecules that make up everything from the air to the ground to materials in machinery vibrate.

As the temperature increases and the molecules vibrate more, the average space between them grows, causing most materials to expand as they heat up. Roads are one place to see this – hot concrete expands, gets constricted and eventually cracks. This phenomenon can happen to machinery, too, and thermal stresses are just the beginning of the problem.

Travel delays and safety risks

High temperatures can also change the way oils in your car’s engine behave, leading to potential engine failures. For example, if a heat wave makes it 30 degrees F (16.7 degrees C) hotter than normal, the viscosity – or thickness – of typical car engine oils can change by a factor of three.

Fluids like engine oils become thinner as they heat up, so if it gets too hot, the oil may not be thick enough to properly lubricate and protect engine parts from increased wear and tear.

Additionally, a hot day will cause the air inside your tires to expand and increases the tire pressure, which could increase wear and the risk of skidding.

Airplanes are also not designed to take off at extreme temperatures. As it gets hotter outside, air starts to expand and takes up more space than before, making it thinner or less dense. This reduction in air density decreases the amount of weight the plane can support during flight, which can cause significant travel delays or flight cancellations.

Battery degradation

In general, the electronics contained in devices like cellphones, personal computers and data centers consist of many kinds of materials that all respond differently to temperature changes. These materials are all located next to each other in tight spaces. So as the temperature increases, different kinds of materials deform differently, potentially leading to premature wear and failure.

Lithium ion batteries in cars and general electronics degrade faster at higher operating temperatures. This is because higher temperatures increase the rate of reactions within the battery, including corrosion reactions that deplete the lithium in the battery. This process wears down its storage capacity. Recent research shows that electric vehicles can lose about 20 percent of their range when exposed to sustained 90-degree Farenheit weather.

Data centers, which are buildings full of servers that store data, dissipate significant amounts of heat to keep their components cool. On very hot days, fans must work harder to ensure chips do not overheat. In some cases, powerful fans are not enough to cool the electronics.

To keep the centers cool, incoming dry air from the outside is often first sent through a moist pad. The water from the pad evaporates into the air and absorbs heat, which cools the air. This technique, called evaporative cooling, is usually an economical and effective way to keep chips at a reasonable operating temperature.

However, evaporative cooling can require a significant amount of water. This issue is problematic in regions where water is scarce. Water for cooling can add to the already intense resource footprint associated with data centers.

Struggling air conditioners

Air conditioners struggle to perform effectively as it gets hotter outside – just when they’re needed the most. On hot days, air conditioner compressors have to work harder to send the heat from homes outside, which in turn disproportionally increases electricity consumption and overall electricity demand.

For example, in Texas, every increase of 1.8 degrees F (1 degree C) creates a rise of about 4 percent in electricity demand.

Heat leads to a staggering 50 percent increase in electricity demand during the summer in hotter countries, posing serious threats of electricity shortages or blackouts, coupled with higher greenhouse gas emissions.

How to prevent heat damage

Heat waves and warming temperatures around the globe pose significant short- and long-term problems for people and machines alike. Fortunately, there are things you can do to minimize the damage.

First, ensure that your machines are kept in an air-conditioned, well-insulated space or out of direct sunlight.

Second, consider using high-energy devices like air conditioners or charging your electric vehicle during off-peak hours when fewer people are using electricity. This can help avoid local electricity shortages.

Reusing heat

Scientists and engineers are developing ways to use and recycle the vast amounts of heat dissipated from machines. One simple example is using the waste heat from data centers to heat water.

Waste heat could also drive other kinds of air-conditioning systems, such as absorption chillers, which can actually use heat as energy to support coolers through a series of chemical- and heat-transferring processes.

In either case, the energy needed to heat or cool something comes from heat that is otherwise wasted. In fact, waste heat from power plants could hypothetically support 27 percent of residential air-conditioning needs, which would reduce overall energy consumption and carbon emissions.

Extreme heat can affect every aspect of modern life, and heat waves aren’t going away in the coming years. However, there are opportunities to harness extreme heat and make it work for us.

Srinivas Garimella is a professor of mechanical engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology and Matthew T. Hughes is a postdoctoral associate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

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

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Hurricane Idalia made landfall this morning near Keaton Beach in northern Florida’s Big Bend region. The Category 3 storm hit with maximum sustained winds of 125 miles per hour with the potential for higher gusts. Idalia is the strongest storm to make landfall in Big Bend, the link between the peninsula and panhandle, in more than 125 years.

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

Idalia was downgraded to a Category 2 storm with maximum sustained winds of 110 MPH, as of the National Hurricane Centers’ 9 AM update. The storm is moving northeast and the National Hurricane Center is warning of “catastrophic impacts” from storm surge. Parts of the Big Bend region could see up to 16 feet of storm surge. Heavy rainfall is expected, with up to six inches of rain expected in the St. Marks/Apalachee Bay area. Flooding began hours before landfall on Treasure Island, a barrier island on the Gulf Coast, where a high tide at 11:30 AM EDT could create even more storm surge and flooding. 

Clearwater Beach is seeing a storm surge between five and six feet while nearby Cedar Key is experiencing between eight and nine feet of storm surge. The water is rising rapidly even during a normal low tide period.

A significant surge between four and five feet into Tampa Bay and it set a new record for water levels in the bay before landfall. At 5:30 AM EDT, water levels were at 3.91 feet over and still rising, even as the tide should be lowering. The previous high water mark was 3.79 feet during Tropical Storm Eta in 2020. The I-275 traffic cams showed abandoned streets and water coming up onto the streets

The hurricane is expected to retain some strength after landfall, as it moves into northern Florida through Wednesday and then into southeastern Georgia by Wednesday afternoon. Damaging winds are also expected beyond the center of the hurricane. 

Overnight, Idalia intensified into an extremely dangerous Category 4 hurricane with winds of 130 mph. Despite the downgrade to a Category 3, Idalia is still very dangerous. “Radar and Air Force Reserve Hurricane Hunter aircraft data indicate that an eyewall replacement cycle has begun,” the National Hurricane Center wrote. “Idalia’s maximum sustained winds are now estimated near 125 mph (205 km/h) with higher gusts. This change in wind speed does not diminish the threat of catastrophic storm surge and damaging winds.”

[Related: The future of hurricanes is full of floods—a lot of them.]

These recent storms have fed on the increasingly warm ocean temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico that fuel more intense hurricanes, and scientists have been sounding the alarm on the repercussions of this for decades. In September 1995, Popular Science magazine featured a warning of a possible wave of killer hurricanes from hurricane forecaster William Gray from Colorado State University. “We’ve gone 25 years with relatively little activity–a long cycle by historical standards. Inevitably, long stretches of destruction will return. Florida and the East Coast will see hurricane devastation such as they’ve never experienced before,” Gray said. 

As Hurricane Idalia moved over the Gulf of Mexico, the storm was able to feed on the energy from this year’s record warm temperatures, which could only add to its devastation.  “It’s 88, 89 degrees [Fahrenheit] over where the storm’s going to be tracking, so that’s effectively rocket fuel for the storm,” Colorado State University hurricane researcher Phil Klotzbach told the AP. “It’s basically all systems go for the storm to intensify.”

Idalia is the third hurricane to make landfall in Florida in the last 12 months. Hurricane Ian slammed the Gulf Coast in September 2022 as a Category 5 storm, killing at least 161 people and causing roughly $113 billion dollars in damage. Only about two months later Hurricane Nicole hit as a late season Category 1 storm.  Hurricanes that begin with the letter “I” are also the most retired names due to their destructive nature and Idalia could be the next storm added to that list. 

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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 Idalia. 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 a hurricane decreases in pressure as a storm strengthens and wind speeds increase. 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. After Hurricane Ian struck Florida in 2022, clean-up crews had to remove debris from the holes where burrowing owls live, since the threatened birds can’t claw through the trash on their own, as one wildlife rehabilitation expert told CNN. And when storms shove salty seawater inland, increases in salinity can disturb trees or turtles that dwell in freshwater ecosystems.

Along the coast, graceful manatees, too, have 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 Idalia 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.”

This post has been updated. It was originally published on September 28, 2022.

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Tropical Storm Hilary drenched parts of Southern California from coastal areas to inland mountains and deserts on August 20. Hilary was the first first tropical storm to hit Southern California in 84 years, and dropped more than half of an average year’s worth of rain in some areas. Popular desert resort city Palm Springs saw nearly three inches of rain by Sunday evening and downtown Los Angeles broke a 117 year-old rainfall record with 2.48 inches of rain.

[Related: A rare tropical storm will skirt by the Southwest, just days after historic heatwave.]

The storm is now considered a post-tropical cyclone as it moves through the southwestern United States. Post-tropical cyclones no longer possess the sufficient tropical characteristics to be considered a tropical cyclone, but can continue to produce heavy rains and high winds, according to the National Hurricane Center.

As of Monday morning, Hilary has winds of roughly 35 MPH with some stronger gusts as it is moving north in central Nevada, about 390 miles north of San Diego. While all coastal tropical storm warnings have ended, flood watches remain for more than 25 million people from Southern California to northern Idaho.

The storm first made landfall on Saturday August 19 in Mexico’s Baja California Peninsula about 150 miles south of Ensenada. One person reportedly drowned Saturday in Santa Rosalia on the eastern coast of the peninsula when a vehicle was swept away in an overflowing stream.The storm then moved through Tijuana and up towards the United States.  

Flooding and mudslides could continue today in Mexico and California as the storm weakens and moves towards Nevada. Unprecedented rainfall of up to 10 inches is possible across parts of Southern California and Nevada through Monday morning. Rainfall up to 5 inches is possible across parts of Oregon and Idaho through Tuesday August 22.

The power grid largely held up, as Southern California Edison reports about 13,000 customers without power as of Sunday. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power reported roughly 3,000 customers without power Sunday evening and San Diego Gas and Electric reported less than 1,000 outages.

Sunday afternoon also brought Southern California another surprise, as an earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 5.1 shook the region. According to the US Geological Survey, the earthquake was centered near Ojai, about 80 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles. Smaller aftershocks were also felt, but the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office said there were no immediate reports of injury or damage. 

[Related: The future of hurricanes is full of floods—a lot of them.]

In September 2022, moisture from Tropical Storm Kay moved through the Southwest, but did not hit the region. California rarely has tropical cyclones or hurricanes that make landfall due to a combination of unfavorable atmospheric conditions off the coast, prevailing east-to-west winds that push storms out to sea, and cold water that sucks the strength out of tropical systems typically keeps them away. Experts say storms like this will remain rare even as the climate changes, but that warming ocean temperatures will make the tropical storms that do make landfall stronger and more damaging. 

The hurricanes that form every year in the Atlantic Ocean near the southeastern US feed off of warm waters and currents that move that water south to north. The West Coast sees the opposite, with ocean currents carrying colder water from Alaska to California. 

“Very warm ocean water is essentially hurricane fuel,” Daniel Swain, a UCLA climate scientist told The Los Angeles Times.  “So you generally need water temperatures getting up toward around 80 degrees or warmer on a sustained basis. The all-time record, high temperature at Scripps Pier [in San Diego] is right at 80 degrees, so we’re almost always well below this temperature threshold the ocean would be required to generate or sustain a tropical cyclone.”

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Armed with scrub brushes, young scuba divers took to the waters of Florida’s Alligator Reef in late July to try to help corals struggling to survive 2023’s extraordinary marine heat wave. They carefully scraped away harmful algae and predators impinging on staghorn fragments, under the supervision and training of interns from Islamorada Conservation and Restoration Education, or I.CARE.

Normally, I.CARE’s volunteer divers would be transplanting corals to waters off the Florida Keys this time of year, as part of a national effort to restore the Florida Reef. But this year, everything is going in reverse.

As water temperatures spiked in the Florida Keys, scientists from universities, coral reef restoration groups and government agencies launched a heroic effort to save the corals. Divers have been in the water every day, collecting thousands of corals from ocean nurseries along the Florida Keys reef tract and moving them to cooler water and into giant tanks on land.

Marine scientist Ken Nedimyer and his team at Reef Renewal USA began moving an entire coral tree nursery from shallow waters off Tavernier to an area 60 feet deep and 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 Celsius) cooler. Even there, temperatures were running about 85 to 86 F (30 C).

Their efforts are part of an emergency response on a scale never before seen in Florida.

The Florida Reef – a nearly 350-mile arc along the Florida Keys that is crucial to fish habitat, coastal storm protection and the local economy – began experiencing record-hot ocean temperatures in June 2023, weeks earlier than expected. The continuing heat has triggered widespread coral bleaching.

While corals can recover from mass bleaching events like this, long periods of high heat can leave them weak and vulnerable to disease that can ultimately kill them.

That’s what scientists and volunteers have been scrambling to avoid.

The heartbeat of the reef

The Florida Reef has struggled for years under the pressure of overfishing, disease, storms and global warming that have decimated its live corals.

A massive coral restoration effort – the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Mission: Iconic Reef – has been underway since 2019 to restore the reef with transplanted corals, particularly those most resilient to the rising temperatures. But even the hardiest coral transplants are now at risk.

Reef-building corals are the foundation species of shallow tropical waters due to their unique symbiotic relationship with microscopic algae in their tissues.

During the day, these algae photosynthesize, producing both food and oxygen for the coral animal. At night, coral polyps feed on plankton, providing nutrients for their algae. The result of this symbiotic relationship is the coral’s ability to build a calcium carbonate skeleton and reefs that support nearly 25% of all marine life.

Unfortunately, corals are very temperature sensitive, and the extreme ocean heat off South Florida, with some reef areas reaching temperatures in the 90s, has put them under extraordinary stress.

When corals get too hot, they expel their symbiotic algae. The corals appear white – bleached – because their carbonate skeleton shows through their clear tissue that lack any colorful algal cells.

Corals can recover new algal symbionts if water conditions return to normal within a few weeks. However, the increase in global temperatures due to the effects of greenhouse gas emissions from human activities is causing longer and more frequent periods of coral bleaching worldwide, leading to concerns for the future of coral reefs.

A MASH unit for corals

This year, the Florida Keys reached an alert level 2, indicating extreme risk of bleaching, about six weeks earlier than normal.

The early warnings and forecasts from NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch Network gave scientists time to begin preparing labs and equipment, track the locations and intensity of the growing marine heat and, importantly, recruit volunteers.

At the Keys Marine Laboratory, scientists and trained volunteers have dropped off thousands of coral fragments collected from heat-threatened offshore nurseries. Director Cindy Lewis described the lab’s giant tanks as looking like “a MASH unit for corals.”

Volunteers there and at other labs across Florida will hand-feed the tiny creatures to keep them alive until the Florida waters cool again and they can be returned to the ocean and eventually transplanted onto the reef.

Protecting corals still in the ocean

I.CARE launched another type of emergency response.

I.CARE co-founder Kylie Smith, a coral reef ecologist and a former student of mine in marine sciences, discovered a few years ago that coral transplants with large amounts of fleshy algae around them were more likely to bleach during times of elevated temperature. Removing that algae may give corals a better chance of survival.

Smith’s group typically works with local dive operators to train recreational divers to assist in transplanting and maintaining coral fragments in an effort to restore the reefs of Islamorada. In summer 2023, I.CARE has been training volunteers, like the young divers from Diving with a Purpose, to remove algae and coral predators, such as coral-eating snails and fireworms, to help boost the corals’ chances of survival.

Monitoring for corals at risk

To help spot corals in trouble, volunteer divers are also being trained as reef observers through Mote Marine Lab’s BleachWatch program.

Scuba divers have long been attracted to the reefs of the Florida Keys for their beauty and accessibility. The lab is training them to recognize bleached, diseased and dead corals of different species and then use an online portal to submit bleach reports across the entire Florida Reef.

The more eyes on the reef, the more accurate the maps showing the areas of greatest bleaching concern.

Rebuilding the reef

While the marine heat wave in the Keys will inevitably kill some corals, many more will survive.

Through careful analysis of the species, genotypes and reef locations experiencing bleaching, scientists and practitioners are learn valuable information as they work to protect and rebuild a more resilient coral reef for the future.

That is what gives hope to Smith, Lewis, Nedimyer and hundreds of others who believe this coral reef is worth saving. Volunteers are crucial to the effort, whether they’re helping with coral reef maintenance, reporting bleaching or raising the awareness of what is at stake if humanity fails to stop warming the planet.

Michael Childress is an associate professor of biological sciences and environmental conservation at Clemson University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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It’s relatively easy to collect water via harvesting fog—in fact, only a few square meters of meshing can collect upwards of several hundred liters of liquid per day. In many cities, however, these reservoirs of water are often contaminated by atmospheric pollution, thus rendering them unfit for cooking or drinking. 

Instead of relying on additional, and in many cases costly, cleaning methods, researchers recently considered the feasibility of an all-in-one fog moisture harvester and purifier. What resulted is an extremely promising, effective, and simple creation that not only offers users potable water, but potentially could clean up power plants’ steam emissions.

As detailed on August 16 in Nature Sustainability, a team of scientists has designed a closely knit metal lattice coated with a mix of polymers and titanium dioxide. The slick polymer component ensures water droplets can quickly collect and trickle down the net, while the titanium dioxide serves as a chemical catalyst to break down organic pollutant molecules.

[Related: Urban water crises often boil down to classism.]

To test out their design, the team artificially generated fog within a laboratory in Zurich which housed the new meshing. According to their measurements, their installation collected 8 percent of the ambient air’s moisture, while the titanium dioxide neutralized roughly 94 percent of added organic compounds. These extra pollutant molecules included both diesel droplets, as well as bisphenol A (BPA), a hormonally active agent most commonly found in everyday plastics.

“Our system not only harvests fog but also treats the harvested water, meaning it can be used in areas with atmospheric pollution, such as densely populated urban centers,” Ritwick Ghosh, an interdisciplinary social scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research and one of the project’s researchers, said in a statement.

As an added bonus, the technology requires ostensibly zero maintenance or artificial power source. Instead, UV light reactivates the titanium oxide in a process known as photocatalytic memory. According to researchers, approximately 30 minutes of exposure to sunlight is enough to keep the titanium oxide activated for a full 24 hours—an important time ratio, given areas of extreme fog (unsurprisingly) don’t experience much sunlight.

The team’s new mesh isn’t limited to smaller scale use—researchers, including project lead Thomas Schutzius, envision installing the technology in power plants’ cooling towers. “In the cooling towers, steam escapes up into the atmosphere. In the United States, where I live, we use a great deal of fresh water to cool power plants,” Schutzius explained. “It would make sense to capture some of this water before it escapes and ensure that it is pure in case you want to return it back to the environment.” The researchers’ design performed equally as well at both small settings, as well as within a pilot plant environment, implying both personal and large scale solutions are possible in the future.

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In western Canada, residents of the city of Yellowknife and neighboring First Nations communities Ndilo and Dettah are fleeing a raging wildfire that is only about 10 miles away from the city. Yellowknife is the capital city of the remote Northwest Territories (NWT) and is home to roughly 20,000 people. More than 200 wildfires have already burned large areas of the NWT this fire season.

[Related: How to mask up to protect yourself from wildfire smoke.]

“The fire now represents a real threat to the city,” the NWT’s environment and climate change minister Shane Thompson, said at a news conference on Wednesday evening.

The evacuation advisory covers about 22,000 people and was issued on Wednesday August 16, with local officials urging residents in the most vulnerable areas to leave immediately. Others were advised to evacuate before noon on Friday August 18. Officials fear that the highway linking outside communities to Yellowknife could be engulfed in flames as early as Friday and urged people to drive south to Alberta if possible. Escort vehicles have been assigned to guide drivers, as the smoke has already made visibility difficult in some areas. 

Those who are unable to leave by vehicle and residents who are immunocompromised or have other conditions that put them at higher risk, can register for evacuation flights. Air evacuations are scheduled to begin today at 1 PM local time. 

Residents were also warned not to flee to the islands in the Great Slave Lake, as the air quality in the region is expected to deteriorate as the fires get closer. 

According to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Yellowknife and its surrounding communities now join NWT communities Fort Smith, Hay River, the Kátł’odeeche First Nation, Enterprise, and Jean Marie River as places whose residents are displaced due to out of control fires.

[Related: Clouds of wildfire smoke are toxic to humans and animals alike.]

So far, this has been Canada’s worst wildfire season on record, largely driven by human-caused climate change. Currently, 1,067 active wildfires are burning in the country, with 230 in the NWT. They have burned more than 8,000 square miles of land–an area already 91 times as large as last year’s entire fire season–and have impacted parts of nearly all of Canada’s 13 provinces. Smoke from the fires has traveled as far east as Europe, and blanketed New York City and other major population centers as far south as the state of Georgia. 

Western Canada is also facing a heat wave that broke 17 daily temperature records on August 14 and smashed 18 records the following day. The heat could further exacerbate the wildfires.

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Originally published by The 19th. We’re answering the “how” and “why” of health and abortion news. Sign up for our daily newsletter.

Extreme heat has already made pregnancy more dangerous. Now, it is also complicating efforts to control when and how someone becomes pregnant: Record heat waves across the country could threaten access to effective pregnancy tests, condoms and emergency contraception pills. 

All of these items can sustain serious damage in extreme heat, rendering them ineffective when used. And all have become critical resources for people living in states with abortion bans and who are trying to avoid pregnancy. In those states, few options exist to terminate an unintended pregnancy other than acquiring abortion pills online or traveling out of state for care.

Many states that have banned abortion are experiencing broiling summers, including Texas, Louisiana, parts of Mississippi and Arkansas. Florida—where abortion is banned after 15 weeks of pregnancy and a six-week ban could take effect later this year—has also recorded unusually high temperatures. 

“People aren’t thinking about the effects of extremely hot heat for all kinds of medical care,” said Rachel Rebouché, dean at the Temple University School of Law, who studies reproductive health law. “And, specific to reproductive health care, people aren’t thinking about condoms and contraception and reproductive health as essential health care.”

In some states that restrict or ban abortion, abortion funds—which typically aid people in paying for the procedure—have put more emphasis on distributing supplies to prevent pregnancy and to detect it early, even while noting that even the most effective contraception isn’t foolproof. Almost all of the supplies they ship are heat-sensitive.

The Yellowhammer Fund, which serves people mostly in Alabama and Mississippi, mails emergency contraception to people in those two states as well as in parts of Florida. Jane’s Due Process, a Texas-based organization, has for the past three years given people kits including emergency contraception, pregnancy tests and condoms. The Lilith Fund, an abortion fund in Texas, recently began distributing “post-abortion” kits for people traveling out of state for care, which include pregnancy tests, condoms and thermometers. 

Pregnancy tests generally should be stored at a temperature between 36 and 86 degrees Fahrenheit. Emergency contraception pills should be kept between 68 and 77 degrees, per the Food and Drug Administration, though they can be transported in temperatures ranging between 59 and 86 degrees. For condoms, the World Health Organization recommends an average shipment temperature no warmer than 86 degrees, noting that peak temperatures shouldn’t exceed 122 degrees and that condoms could be damaged if they are stored at above 104 degrees for an extended period of time. 

Extreme heat has already complicated efforts to disseminate contraceptive supplies. Last month, staff from the Lilith Fund reported heat damage to about $3,500 worth of pregnancy tests, thermometers and condoms, the result of a temporary air-conditioning outage at a storage facility in San Antonio. The organization was able to raise money from supporters to replace those items, but will be factoring heat risk in future budgets.

“It’s on our radar, and it’s on the radar of our partners as well,” said Cristina Parker, the fund’s communications director. “This definitely has an impact on our budget, no doubt.”

Other organizations haven’t experienced similar damage. But organizers and health scholars indicated concern that the unusually warm summer—with temperatures across much of the South consistently surpassing 100 degrees Fahrenheit at a higher frequency than usual—will undercut people’s ability to access heat-sensitive reproductive health supplies.

“One thing we’ve always stressed is do not keep kits in your car, especially in Texas heat,” said Graci D’Amore, who coordinates the distribution of reproductive health kits for Jane’s Due Process. “It’s 120 degrees in the car, and Plan B needs to be kept at below 80 degrees for it to maintain efficacy.”

Jane’s Due Process stores its supplies in an air-conditioned office building. But the fear of losing power is more pressing than it was even a few years ago, before a winter snowstorm—also unusual for the state—caused a massive power outage.

“The fear and threat of the [power] grid failing—I think it’s on everyone’s mind,” D’Amore said. 

Many organizations, including the Yellowhammer Fund and the Texas family planning provider Every Body Texas, distribute emergency contraception through the mail. But even if medications are stored in a climate-controlled atmosphere, they risk exposure to heat while waiting in someone’s mailbox, at their doorstep or in a delivery vehicle. In those cases, there is little health or reproductive rights organizations can do other than encourage people to bring mail in as quickly as possible.

“When I bring in packages, even when they have not been outside for very long, the contents have been hot to the touch,” said Elizabeth Sepper, a health law professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “There’s no way to control what happens once it leaves your hand.”

The heat burden, Sepper and others noted, doesn’t fall equally. People who don’t have access to regular air-conditioning in their homes or cars are more likely to be exposed to extreme heat and to potentially risk damage to family planning and reproductive health supplies. Those who seek abortions and who have to travel out of state, which can mean several hours or even days’ worth of driving, could also suffer more. 

“Even people who have cars with functioning air conditioners will find their car engines or air-conditioning can struggle in long travel in this heat,” Sepper said. “If you’re in a car that doesn’t have functioning air-conditioning or that might struggle to make long distances in the heat—we will see for poorer people, the travel out of state will become even more onerous than it already is.”

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People returning to what remains of the beachside town of Lahaina, Hawaii, and other Maui communities after one of the nation’s deadliest wildfire disasters face more dangers, beyond the 2,200 buildings destroyed or damaged and dozens of lives lost. The fires also left lingering health risks for humans and wildlife.

When fires spread through communities, as we’ve seen more often in recent years, they burn structures that contain treated wood, plastics, paints and hazardous household wastes. They can burn vehicles and melt plastic water pipes. All of these items release toxic gases and particles.

Many airborne pollutants fall to the ground, and when debris or dust is stirred up, hazardous particles can enter the air, where people can easily breathe them in.

Chemicals can also contaminate water supplies. On Aug. 11, 2023, Maui County issued an “unsafe water” alert for areas of Lahaina and Upper Kula that were affected by wildfires, warning residents to use only bottled water for drinking and cooking, and not rely on boiling tap water because of the risk of harmful chemicals.

As an environmental engineer, I work with colleagues to help communities respond to and recover from wildfires and other disasters, including the Marshall Fire in Boulder County, Colorado, and the Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise, California. Lahaina and other Maui communities face similar risks ahead.

Chemical hazards in fire debris

Residents returning to their burned neighborhoods will likely find themselves surrounded by hazards. Some are obvious, such as broken glass, nails and damaged natural gas containers. Broken power lines and gas lines may be live or leaking.

Less obvious are the chemical hazards that can reach well beyond the fire zone.

Black smoke from a fire is a sign of incomplete combustion that can produce thousands of chemicals when wood and plastics burn.

Chemicals like benzene, lead, asbestos and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, are common in ash, runoff and sometimes water systems after fires.

Exposure to high levels of chemicals can sometimes cause immediate harm, such as nausea, vomiting, dizziness, rashes and respiratory issues. For these reasons it is critical to protect people, especially children and people with health conditions, from exposure.

State health officials recommended that residents wear close-toed shoes, N95 respirators, chemical resistant gloves and other protective equipment while looking through property debris.

When disaster debris is eventually removed by professionals, the contractors will be wearing Tyvek suits and possibly respirators to protect their health.

Buildings that didn’t burn can still have hazards

Even buildings deemed structurally safe may have pollutants that make them unsafe for human health.

Particles and vapors can enter buildings through cracks, doors, windows and other portals. Some of these pollutants settle onto surfaces, while others penetrate fabrics, stick to walls and enter air ducts.

Often buildings must be professionally cleaned or decontaminated by wildfire remediation companies. Cleaning surfaces and ducts, replacing air filters and installing HEPA filters can also help.

Drinking water risks and soil testing

Drinking water is another serious concern after urban fires.

Wildfires can make the plumbing outside or inside the building itself unsafe in a couple of ways. Loss of water pressure can allow pollutants to enter pipes. Maui County cited this risk in issuing its “unsafe water” alert on Aug. 11. When plastic pipes heat up, they can also decompose and then directly leach chemicals into water.

My colleagues and I have documented benzene levels that exceeded hazardous limits for drinking water after several previous fires. PAHs can also be present, as our research has shown.

These and other chemicals pose an immediate health risk to water users, even if the water smells fine. Simple water flushing can fail to remove severe contamination. Proper inspections and testing in buildings and for private wells and larger water systems are important.

Outside, the ground can also become contaminated in a fire. Once the debris is removed, testing is necessary to ensure that the soil where people will replant their gardens, yards and fruit trees is free of hazardous chemicals and safe for humans and pets.

Protecting waterways and aquatic life

During firefighting and clean-up, and when it rains, pollutants can wash into waterways and end up in the ocean.

Lahaina stretches along Maui’s west coast and has long been a popular site for seeing sea turtles and other marine life. That sea life may now be at risk from pollutants from burned coastal buildings and runoff. The fire burned to the shoreline, destroying boats, docks and other vehicles, some of which sank.

Debris and sunken boats will need to be removed from the nearshore waters to protect corals. Similar to wildfires near lakes, rivers and streams, water testing will be necessary.

Communities can avoid more harmful runoff during the cleanup process by placing pollution-control barriers near storm drains, around properties and near waterways. These can help intercept pollutants flowing toward the ocean.

What happens to all the debris?

How to safely dispose of all the debris as the community is cleaned up and recovers is another question.

After the 2021 Marshall Fire in Colorado, where about 1,200 structures were destroyed, the cleanup generated 300,000 tons of waste. In Maui, debris may have to be taken off the island for disposal.

Cleanup and recovery from a disaster of this magnitude takes years. In the process, I recommend residents reach out to public health departments for advice to help them stay healthy and safe.

This article was updated Aug. 12, 2023, with new damage estimates from Maui County officials.

Andrew J. Whelton is a professor of civil, environmental & ecological engineering, director of the Healthy Plumbing Consortium and Center for Plumbing Safety at Purdue University. Whelton receives funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation, U.S. National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, City of Louisville, Paradise Irrigation District, Paradise Rotary Foundation, the Water Research Foundation, and crowdfunding. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Wildfire smoke from Canada’s extreme fire season has left a lot of people thinking about air quality and wondering what to expect in the days ahead.

All air contains gaseous compounds and small particles. But as air quality gets worse, these gases and particles can trigger asthma and exacerbate heart and respiratory problems as they enter the nose, throat and lungs and even circulate in the bloodstream. When wildfire smoke turned New York City’s skies orange in early June 2023, emergency room visits for asthma doubled.

In most cities, it’s easy to find a daily air quality index score that tells you when the air is considered unhealthy or even hazardous. However, predicting air quality in the days ahead isn’t so simple.

I work on air quality forecasting as a professor of civil and environmental engineering. Artificial intelligence has improved these forecasts, but research shows it’s much more useful when paired with traditional techniques. Here’s why:

How scientists predict air quality

To predict air quality in the near future – a few days ahead or longer – scientists generally rely on two main methods: a chemical transport model or a machine-learning model. These two models generate results in totally different ways.

Chemical transport models use lots of known chemical and physical formulas to calculate the presence and production of air pollutants. They use data from emissions inventories reported by local agencies that list pollutants from known sources, such as wildfires, traffic or factories, and data from meteorology that provides atmospheric information, such as wind, precipitation, temperature and solar radiation.

These models simulate the flow and chemical reactions of the air pollutants. However, their simulations involve multiple variables with huge uncertainties. Cloudiness, for example, changes the incoming solar radiation and thus the photochemistry. This can make the results less accurate.

Machine-learning models instead learn patterns over time from historical data to predict future air quality for any given region, and then apply that knowledge to current conditions to predict the future.

The downside of machine-learning models is that they do not consider any chemical and physical mechanisms, as chemical transport models do. Also, the accuracy of machine-learning projections under extreme conditions, such as heat waves or wildfire events, can be off if the models weren’t trained on such data. So, while machine-learning models can show where and when high pollution levels are most likely, such as during rush hour near freeways, they generally cannot deal with more random events, like wildfire smoke blowing in from Canada.

Which is better?

Scientists have determined that neither model is accurate enough on its own, but using the best attributes of both models together can help better predict the quality of the air we breathe.

This combined method, known as the machine-learning – measurement model fusion, or ML-MMF, has the ability to provide science-based predictions with more than 90% accuracy. It is based on known physical and chemical mechanisms and can simulate the whole process, from the air pollution source to your nose. Adding satellite data can help them inform the public on both air quality safety levels and the direction pollutants are traveling with greater accuracy.

We recently compared predictions from all three models with actual pollution measurements. The results were striking: The combined model was 66% more accurate than the chemical transport model and 12% more accurate than the machine-learning model alone.

The chemical transport model is still the most common method used today to predict air quality, but applications with machine-learning models are becoming more popular. The regular forecasting method used by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s AirNow.gov relies on machine learning. The site also compiles air quality forecast results from state and local agencies, most of which use chemical transport models.

As information sources become more reliable, the combined models will become more accurate ways to forecast hazardous air quality, particularly during unpredictable events like wildfire smoke.

Joshua S. Fu is the Chancellor’s Professor in Engineering, Climate Change and Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Tennessee. Fu received funding from U. S. EPA for wildfire and human health studies.

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

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Airlines can’t control the weather. They can only do the next best thing, which is to predict upcoming hazards as accurately as possible, as soon as possible, and plan ahead for route disruptions. To do that, they need a team of meteorologists tracking conditions in the sky and on the ground. Delta Air Lines gave PopSci a peek into the inner workings of their weather team. Here’s what we found out. 

“There’s always weather. Every summer, we’re always ready for thunderstorms, we’re always ready for hot temperatures across the desert southwest,” says Warren Weston, lead meteorologist at Delta. Summer brings its unique set of challenges. For this summer in particular, Weston says they observed a fairly persistent high pressure set up across the desert southwest. 

“When we saw the hot temperatures, we started producing a daily forecast for Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Salt Lake City, that was available not only to our decision-makers here within our operation center, but it was also visible to the station managers in the field,” he adds. “And they could look at each day to see what the temperature was each hour, so they would know what hours of the day to expect the highest impact, and we were able to give them this higher resolution data for them to make decisions.” 

[Related: You can blame Southwest Airlines’ holiday catastrophe on outdated software]

Climate change is adding another set of challenges for meteorologists. But weather is an incredibly data-driven field, and Weston hopes that with the learnings they gather each summer, they’ll be able to predict hazardous events in a better and more timely manner. 

Here’s a detailed look at the breakdown of the meteorology team’s job. Delta boasts that it has 23 meteorologists on staff, which is more than any other airline. 

Every day, this team provides weather briefings to the operations operators at airports, and monitors ongoing conditions. They source a great deal of publicly available data from the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The team also uses in-house data for their predictions. For instance, if a plane is flying from point A to point B, and they start receiving turbulence, they can make a pilot report. That report is visible inside of Delta’s operation center, and the team can use that information to refine their turbulence forecast. 

Airline meterologists are the sole weather providers for Delta Air Lines. But every day they collaborate with government meteorologists and other airline meteorologists on highlighted areas of concern, like if a line of thunderstorms is traveling across a specific area in the US. They also collaborate with the air traffic control system command center in Washington DC to give them an idea of what Delta is thinking in terms of tailoring their routes based on the forecasts.

The meteorologists are split into two groups: The “surface desk” and the “upper air desk.”

The surface desk meteorologists look at Delta’s hub airports like Atlanta and New York City closely and puts out detailed hourly forecasts, primarily for the next 30 hours. “On those desks we’re looking for things like thunderstorms, is there going to be low clouds causing fog, or anything that could prevent us from getting into that airport when we attempt to land,” says Weston.

The “upper air desk” looks at high-level turbulence and other conditions such as space weather like solar flares, concentrations of ozone, and even volcanic ash, which can damage an airplane’s engines.

“On the upper air side, most of our forecasts are happening well before the flight is planned. If you think about a 10-hour flight from the US to Europe, you need a forecast that’s valid for the next 10 or 15 hours, not just right now,” Weston says. “We’re looking at turbulence, thunderstorms, and working with our flight planners to find the most efficient route with the least amount of turbulence.”

For example, if there was a snowstorm forecast for New York City, they’ll start issuing updates a few days before the storm gets there to other parts of the operation like the station manager looking at staffing levels. Extra hands may be needed if planes need de-icing. If it isn’t planned for, that can all cause delays. 

[Related: How a quantum computer tackles a surprisingly difficult airport problem]

If a hurricane or severe storm is brewing, the meteorology team has to issue a specific forecast showing when the main impacts will be. “Most of the times in a hurricane you’ll get winds high enough that it’s over the threshold that an airplane is able to land or take off in. So it’s our job to narrow down that time frame to say between this period and this period, conditions are going to be inoperable,” Weston explains. “But, as we get outside of this time period, the winds will come down and we should be able to gradually start operating, and restore operation to a certain region.” 

The team monitors air quality conditions too, not just for seeing whether planes can fly, but for ensuring that the ground crew is staying safe as well. In that respect, wildfire smoke has become an item of note to look out for. “Smoke is very unique because of course we don’t predict the formation of smoke, because that’s predicting a forest fire which we are not in the business of doing,” Weston says. “But our concern with the fire is that it results in mostly air quality issues. If the air quality because of the smoke reaches a certain threshold, then there’s processes in place, like having [the ground crew members] mask, or having them work outside only for a certain amount of time.”

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UPDATE 9/18/23 07:40 AM: This story has been updated to reflect a change in the death toll.

Devastating wildfires in Maui have killed at least 97 people and injured dozens, as thousands of residents have been forced to flee. The fires took the island home to more than 160,000 residents by surprise and started spreading widely on Tuesday August 8. 

[Related: Clouds of wildfire smoke are toxic to humans and animals alike.]

According to the United States Drought Monitor, the 735 square mile island of Maui is in  a moderate drought covering over one-third of the island. Some parts of the island are seeing severe drought. In addition to the dry conditions, flames were spread by strong winds from Hurricane Dora. The Category 4 storm is churning more than 800 miles away from the island to the south, which is close enough to fan the flames.

“We don’t know what actually ignited the fires, but we were made aware in advance by the National Weather Service that we were in a red flag situation — so that’s dry conditions for a long time, so the fuel, the trees and everything, was dry,” Maj. Gen. Kenneth Hara, commander general of the Hawaii Army National Guard, said at Wednesday’s briefing, according to CBS News. Those conditions and the low humidity and high winds, “set the conditions for the wildfires,” he said.

Crews battled blazes all over the island on Wednesday. Some adults and children attempted to flee into the ocean to escape, according to the Associated Press. The Coast Guard reported that it rescued 14 people (including two children) who jumped into the water to get away from the smoke and flames.

The flames destroyed the popular tourist destination Lahaina Town which dates to the 1700s. The town was once the capital of the Kingdom of Hawaii and the area is steeped in Native Hawaiian history and culture. 

“People are worried about their loved ones, their homes, their businesses, their jobs,” David Aiona Chang, a Native Hawaiian and professor of history at the University of Minnesota, told NBC News. “So many of the disasters that hit Hawaii hit Native Hawaiians the hardest. It’s something that we are going to be dealing with for a long time.”

More than 11,000 people have already evacuated Maui. On Wednesday afternoon, local officials on the island urged visitors and residents to leave Lahaina and the island Maui “as soon as possible.” There is an ongoing mass bus evacuation underway, and seats are still available on flights off of the island.

As of Thursday morning, firefighters on Maui have used more than 150,000 gallons of water according to Maj. Gen. Hara. The helicopters used to battle the flames, but high winds of 85 miles per hour hampered these efforts. 

Human-caused climate change has exacerbated the dry and incredibly hot conditions that allow wildfires like the ones on Maui to ignite and spread.  

[Related: How to mask up to protect yourself from wildfire smoke.]

Erica Fleishman, the director of the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute at Oregon State University, told CNN that these wildfires are “unnerving.” While it is difficult to say if climate change can be linked to this specific event without a thorough analysis and review, Fleishman adds, scientists can break down the conditions that made these wildfires possible.  

“We can say there are conditions that are consistent with wildfire, wildfire size and expansion that are changing as climate changes,” Fleishman said. “And some of the things that we’re seeing with this wildfire in Maui are consistent with some of the trends that are known and projected as climate changes.”

Scientists are still trying to fully understand the bigger picture of how the climate crisis is affecting Hawaii, but the current drought is expected to get worse as temperatures increase. Extreme heat dries out vegetation on the island, which then fuels deadly wildfires.

President Joe Biden ordered all available federal resources and assets to help with the response. Former President Barack Obama, who was born in Hawaii, prompted those who want to help with the relief efforts to donate to the Hawai’i Community Foundation’s Maui Strong Fund on social media. 

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This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

A curtain of white vapor blurred the outline of Alessandro Santi as he bent over the edge of a gray bubbling pond in Pozzuoli, a city in southern Italy. In the thick sulfurous cloud, the 30-year-old technician dipped a six-foot pole, the end of which was attached to a plastic cup, into the 180-degree Fahrenheit water and pulled back a sample. He turned around and carefully poured the water into a glass container.

Underneath his feet, one of the world’s most dangerous volcanoes lay dormant. While many people have heard of nearby Vesuvius, which wiped out Pompeii in 79 AD, far fewer are familiar with this underground threat.

Santi was doing field research in a large circular depression—or caldera, created when a volcano explodes and collapses—that measures up to 9 miles across. The caldera, known as the Phlegraean Fields, is part of a larger stretch of mostly underground and undersea volcanos that run along the Italian coast.

The last two major Phlegraean (pronounced FLEG-rian) eruptions occurred about 40,000 and 15,000 years ago. They annihilated most life forms in the region and sent ashes all the way to Russia. Scientists today are worried about the consequences of another eruption, now that around half a million people have built their homes, vineyards, schools, and roads just above this unstable terrain.

Over the past 18 years, the ground level in Pozzuoli has risen by about 43 inches, and it’s not uncommon for local residents to wake up to sudden sounds and vibrations from the Earth’s bowels. The frequency of earthquakes has been rising, and in 2012, the Italian Civil Protection Department, which is responsible for preventing and managing emergencies, raised its level of alertness from green to yellow. This signaled a need for greater attention and resources to monitor the caldera. Scientists know that something is happening down below, but they’re not exactly sure what.

“The catch is that we can’t go down directly” to check, said Santi. Instead, local researchers sample and measure what they can access, including water from the pond and gases from fumaroles, or vents. The samples carry traces of carbon dioxide, methane, and hydrochloric acid, among other chemicals, which originate far below the pond’s muddy bottom. Changes in the levels of these substances might signal danger, such as the imminent arrival of magma.

The water sampling is part of a greater routine effort by the Naples Center of Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology, known as the Vesuvian Observatory, which hosts intricate seismic monitoring systems and works with pioneering technology to monitor the volcano. Through dozens of on-field and underwater monitoring sites, the center is keeping the pulse of the caldera; it’s ready to alert Italy’s Civil Protection Department, which has been planning mass evacuations if things go south.

The effectiveness of such an emergency operation would likely depend upon the willingness of local residents to follow orders. “Collaboration between different stakeholders and residents is crucial,” said Rosella Nave, a researcher at the Vesuvian Observatory, “both in planning and managing a crisis.” According to several studies, many living on top of the caldera don’t perceive it as a salient threat. Instead, older generations remain haunted by past mismanaged evacuations, which brought significant economic losses to the local community. Other residents, meanwhile, are more worried, and do not trust the Civil Protection Department to respond effectively in an emergency. Some residents have responded to minor earthquakes in ways that would prevent the smooth execution of a formal evacuation plan, said longtime Pozzuoli resident Anna Peluso, who runs a Facebook group that discusses the volcano monitoring and evacuation plans.

A massive explosion is unlikely to happen anytime soon, scientists say, but smaller eruptions would not come as a surprise: There have been 23 in the past 5,500 years. And because the bay is now densely populated, even a relatively weak burst could turn into a catastrophe.

The Italian peninsula sits atop the border where the Eurasian and African tectonic plates meet. As the African plate dives under the Eurasian one, it stretches part of the Eurasian plate thin, like a pizza dough. According to Mauro Di Vito, a volcanologist and the director of the Vesuvian Observatory, this complex movement sends fresh magma — molten rock below the Earth’s surface — to Italy’s 12 active volcanoes. (Magma that breaches the Earth’s surface is referred to as “lava.”)

Since Ancient Roman times, the Phlegraean Fields have experienced periods of what’s known as bradyseism: the steady uplift or descent of the Earth’s surface. (The term derives from a combination of the Greek words for “slow” and “movement,” and is pronounced BRADY-size-um.) Yet because the region lacks a mountainous landform—something resembling, say, Mount Saint Helens in Washington State, or Mount Fuji, just outside of Tokyo, Japan—few suspected the presence of an active volcano. This began to change in the 1950s, when a Swiss scientist conducting field work in Italy hypothesized that the Phlegraean Fields were part of a caldera.

Over the next decades, geophysicists began to monitor the area. In 2008, a team of researchers identified a sizeable magmatic reservoir about 5 miles underneath Pozzuoli, and smaller pockets of magma exist a bit higher in the crust, Di Vito said. Heat and gases from the fiery underground reservoir create pressure that cracks the layers of rock above; around 2 miles above those cracks, at the Earth’s surface, people feel the movement as an earthquake.

Within the volcanic scientific community, there are varying lines of thought on the future of the Phlegraean Fields. Some say that the current earthquakes and ground uplift stem just from the release of gases from the reservoir and the area’s hydrothermal system. Therefore, it’s possible that the ground will eventually deflate and earthquakes will diminish. Others say that the movement of magma in past decades has weakened the Earth’s crust, making it more likely to rupture than previously thought. In this case, were the magma to reach the surface, things could get nasty: An eruption could potentially destroy the 5 cities plus the part of Naples that all sit on top of the caldera.

The lack of consensus stems from a basic problem in volcanology: Scientists have yet to develop an approach that can precisely predict future eruptions. While the presence of magmatic gases in the caldera’s fumaroles might signal the imminent arrival of an eruption, there’s no good way to predict an eruption a year or months in advance.

In 2017, Christopher Kilburn, a professor of volcanology at University College London, co-published a study with Vesuvian Observatory scientists in Nature Communications that caught the attention of the Italian media. While it had been previously thought that periods of relatively fast ground uplift in the Naples region were followed by relaxation of the Earth’s crust, the paper suggested that the crust is actually accumulating the stress. “With each episode of unrest, uplift, the chances are we’re getting closer to the possibility of breaking the crust,” Kilburn told Undark.

In June, Kilburn and his colleagues published a follow-up study, which found that, around 2020, the pattern of earthquakes caused by the volcano had changed, leading the team to conclude that the Earth’s crust was becoming weaker over time, and more prone to rupturing.

According to Kilburn, signs of an imminent eruption could be very subtle. This is what happened at the Rabaul caldera in Papua New Guinea, he said. There, a couple years of intense seismic activity was followed by a 10-year period of relative stillness, Kilburn said. Then, suddenly, in September 1994, after only 27 hours of unrest, the volcano erupted, devastating the town of Rabaul.

Although there is no way to know that the same thing will happen in the Phlegraean Fields, Kilburn stressed, the findings show how the Earth’s crust could break without much extra pressure, which is something to consider for evacuation plans.

Previous disasters have resulted in criminal lawsuits for scientists and government decision makers seeking to keep people safe. After an earthquake in central Italy killed 309 people in 2009, seven Italian experts were convicted of manslaughter for carrying out what was deemed to be a superficial risk analysis and for providing false reassurances to the public.

The defendants were sentenced to six years of jail, though all but one was eventually acquitted.

When asked about this lawsuit, Di Vito said that earthquakes cannot be predicted like eruptions of a well-monitored volcano, and that multiple government decision makers are involved in monitoring and assessing risk at a volcano site. “In the case of the emergency in a volcanic area, the situation is quite different.” But still, he added, the 2009 earthquake was a “lesson for Civil Protection and for scientists.”

In 1970, Eleonora Puntillo, then a Naples-based journalist, noticed something strange happening at the Pozzuoli harbor. When people disembarked from ferries, they had to step up to the pier; in the past, they’d had to step down.

“Either the sea had subsided, or the earth had risen,” the 84-year-old reporter recently told Undark. She started investigating and confirmed with local residents that the ground had indeed risen and damaged several buildings, but surprisingly, scientists were not doing much to monitor the likely cause of this bradyseism: the caldera, part of which sits directly below the harbor.

Puntillo knew that in 1538, the Monte Nuovo volcano had erupted, spitting ash and magma just a few miles from Pozzuoli’s old city center. Back then, the soil had risen, accompanied by a series of scary earthquakes. Puntillo connected the dots and published an article headlined “The Sea Retreats, The Volcano Boils,” reminding the community that a similar phenomenon had occurred in their region half a millennium earlier.

“I wish I had never done that,” Puntillo said, recalling how hordes of journalists had rushed to Pozzuoli and asked her where the next volcano would pop up. They wrote stories with terrifying headlines that made the community panic. A few days later, residents of the Rione Terra neighborhood, which had experienced much of the lift, woke up and discovered hundreds of soldiers had arrived to evacuate thousands of people from the area.

Heartbreaking scenes followed, with forceful evictions, mothers carrying mattresses, and children in tears. Panic spread, and residents outside the Rione Terra neighborhood also fled. According to The New York Times, at least 30,000 people evacuated Pozzuoli. “I still get goosebumps today at the sight of that terrifying escape,” Puntillo said. In her view, there was no need for the government’s use of force.

Ultimately, the dramatic shifting of the earth lasted two more years, but the volcano did not erupt. Residents of Rione Terra were never allowed to return to their homes and were moved permanently to a different neighborhood inside the caldera.

Residents of Pozzuoli now have generational memories of lost homes, businesses, and livelihoods — not due to a volcano throwing rocks into the sky, but due to the Italian state that evicted them. “We have bradyseism in our blood,” said Giuseppe Minieri, the 53-year-old owner of Pozzuoli’s A’ Scalinatella restaurant. “We were born here.”

Antonio Isabettini, a painter who has portrayed the Phlegraean Fields from countless angles, stood on his home’s balcony in the run-down Rione Toiano, which was given to his parents by the state in the 70s after they left Rione Terra, a move they had been planning prior to the evacuation. He pointed his finger toward the ground and said, “I’m standing on this plane, which is actually a volcano. What do I do? Should I leave?” Before moving there, he lived for 15 years in an apartment building bordering the Solfatara, a volcanic crater that constantly emits steam and sulfur fumes.

“We co-live with this; we know this is a dancing land; we know that there is a magmatic chamber down here,” he said. But if the entire caldera were to erupt like it did millennia ago, he added, it would be disastrous.

On the third floor of the Vesuvian Observatory, Mario Castellano stood in front of a dozens of computer screens that display data arriving from more than 60 permanent monitoring stations on the Phlegraean Fields. A 2.8 magnitude earthquake had been recorded the night before.

“If there is a strong earthquake, we notify the Civil Protection,” said Castellano, the technologist director at the control center. Over the past 17 years, Castellano said he has witnessed a steady increase in the number and magnitude of earthquakes.

In addition to using seismometers to record the Earth’s vibrations, the observatory’s scientists use both land and custom-designed marine GPS stations to detect what are known as land deformations, places where the ground has risen or fallen due to pressure from underground gases or magma. Additionally, instruments called tiltmeters measure subtle shifts in ground slope. This constant flow of data is crucial to detecting the upward movement of magma quickly, said Prospero De Martino, the scientist in charge of monitoring land deformations.

De Martino has noticed an increase in ground lifting speed, but scientists aren’t certain what is causing it: Gases? Magma? Either way, such a dramatic change in the Earth’s surface is enough to worry De Martino.

The researchers compile the monitoring data into a bulletin, which is published every Tuesday on the observatory’s website and social media platforms, so the public can stay informed on the state of the volcano. Occasionally, the observatory receives phone calls from concerned residents asking when and where they should evacuate—advice that only the Civil Protection Department can give, not the scientists.

For people living in the caldera, attitudes around the threat the Phlegraean Fields pose have, in certain ways, been changing. In a survey conducted in 2006, most study participants viewed an eruption of Mount Vesuvius as a danger, despite the fact that scientists say an imminent eruption there is highly unlikely. These same individuals didn’t know much about the volcano underneath their feet. Additionally, people reported having little trust in local authorities to manage a volcanic emergency.

These findings prompted the observatory and the area’s municipalities to undertake an educational campaign to create awareness of the caldera. They gave talks in schools, public offices, and city squares. In 2019, Nave and her team conducted a follow-up study to see if volcanic risk perception had changed over time. Although the study has not yet been published, preliminary findings suggest that 37 percent of locals still fear Vesuvius above all (though this has dropped from 70 percent in the 2006 survey), and the level of trust in a governmental response remains minimal. The survey also revealed that that most local residents don’t list the volcano as among the top seven problems in their community.

However, 60 percent of those surveyed recognized the Phlegraean Fields as the more threatening volcano, and more locals are aware of the emergency plans than they were in 2006. “Residents’ awareness of volcanic hazards is higher now,” Nave wrote in an email to Undark.

Perhaps paradoxically, some residents believe the caldera could explode without any warning signs at all, a scenario that no scientists have hypothesized.

Some researchers aren’t surprised by the reaction. In fact, the perception of panic “is institutionalized by emergency plans,” said Francesco Santoianni, who spent 40 years working at the local Civil Protection Department office. It is “criminal,” he said, that evacuation exercises “are carried out as if the only solution is to escape as far and as quickly as possible.” He recalled one exercise in which volunteers showed citizens how to escape through windows.

Antonio Ricciardi, a geologist monitoring the Phlegraean Fields and other volcanoes from the national headquarters of the Civil Protection Department in Rome, said that Italy’s prime minister, advised by the Major Risks Commission and the head of Civil Protection, will declare what is called a pre-alarm status only if things get really bad: thousands of earthquakes per day; the ground deforming and tilting significantly; an abundance of gases laced with carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide—a sign that magma is about to surface; cracks in the streets and broken pipes. Under these circumstances, the government will empty hospitals and prisons, and cultural assets will be moved or wrapped up to withstand the heat. Some locals will start leaving the area of their own volition, scared by the mayhem. If things worsen, a full emergency status, called the “alarm phase,” will kick in.

It will take 72 hours to evacuate all half-a-million people living in the danger zone, said Antonella Scalzo, a geologist at the Civil Protection Department who is involved with planning and handling a Phlegraean Fields emergency. The evacuation goal, she added, is to make sure that nobody is there if the volcano erupts. Anyone who remains could find themselves in the path of a violent river of gases and volcanic material after an eruption, moving at hundreds of miles per hour with temperatures several hundred to over 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

During the emergency phase, people should know which roads to take to evacuate the area. If they do not want to leave independently, public transportation will carry them to safety, said Scalzo.

“We have to do a lot of work to make people accept that, not today, not tomorrow, but maybe one day, they will be asked to vacate their home indefinitely,” Nave said. Otherwise, “if you don’t go, you’ll end up like a Pompeian.”

Not everyone needs to be persuaded. Many people will evacuate on their own at the first signs of an imminent eruption, Anna Peluso, the longtime Pozzuoli resident, wrote to Undark. She also pointed to one 2015 earthquake, when parents rushed to school to retrieve their children instead of waiting for the announcement of an evacuation, as per the government’s plan. The additional cars on the road paralyzed the city’s traffic.

“Something is happening. Something has changed,” said Peluso. As she walked along a pier, she pointed to roughly a dozen boats, which floated well below the dock to which they were secured.

Next, she stopped at the nearby port, which was empty of water and where small fishing boats almost touched the seabed—clear signs that the earth has risen. Heading away from the sea and into the city center, she passed buildings showing signs of cracks and wear. One four-story residence was missing chunks of earthy red paint and plaster, and fissures ran along its façade.

Many of Peluso’s neighbors, she said, have dismissed her as an alarmist for openly talking about the volcano. But she said she doesn’t care. What worries her instead are the unanswered questions: What is the underlying cause of the increased ground uplift? Will the observatory detect dangerous changes in volcanic activity? And if an evacuation occurs—when will authorities let residents return to their homes? 

Before going home, Peluso stopped along her walk and noted that a volcanic crater could “open up right here, in the middle of the street.”

Then she turned to look at the sea. The sunset had painted the water with a calming orange tint. A rocky coastline hugged the harbor. “When somebody asks, ‘Why do you live in Pozzuoli?’” she said, “the answer is right there.”

Agostino Petroni is a journalist, author, and a 2021 Pulitzer Center Reporting Fellow. His work appears in a number of outlets, including National Geographic, BBC, and The Washington Post.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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In a summer of smashed temperature records and extreme weather events, it’s natural to wonder if anywhere is safe from the wrath of human-made climate change. The answer is probably not, even in the most remote places. A study published August 8 in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Science found that extreme events, including ocean heatwaves and ice loss, will be more common and more severe in Antarctica. 

[Related: Record-breaking heat is bombarding the North and South poles.]

Drastic action is needed to limit global warming to the target of 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit made in the 2015 Paris Agreement, and the team on this study are warning that Antarctica’s recent extreme could only be the beginning.  

“Antarctic change has global implications,” study co-author and University of Exeter geoscientist and glaciologist Martin Siegert said in a statement. “Reducing greenhouse gas emissions to net zero is our best hope of preserving Antarctica, and this must matter to every country—and individual—on the planet.”

Recently, the ice sheets on Antarctica’s western end and particularly its peninsula have seen dramatic and fast melting that threatens to raise global sea level over the next few centuries. The Thwaites glacier, also called the Doomsday Glacier, on the continent’s western side is melting at an especially rapid pace.

In the study, a team recorded extreme events occurring in the Southern Ocean and Antarctica, including weather, ocean temperatures, sea ice, glacier and ice shelf systems, as well as biodiversity on the land and sea. They found that the continent’s fragile environments “may well be subject to considerable stress and damage in future years and decades.” The team calls for urgent policy action to protect it and many countries could be breaching an international treaty by not protecting Antarctica.

“Signatories to the Antarctic Treaty (including the UK, USA, India and China) pledge to preserve the environment of this remote and fragile place,” said Siegert. “Nations must understand that by continuing to explore, extract and burn fossil fuels anywhere in the world, the environment of Antarctica will become ever more affected in ways inconsistent with their pledge.”

The study also considered Antarctica’s vulnerability to a range of extreme events to understand the causes and likely future changes. One of these includes the world’s largest recorded heatwave, which occurred in East Antarctica in 2022. Temperatures were a staggering 70 degrees above average, and winter sea ice formation is currently the lowest on record. 

The high temperatures have also been linked to years with lower krill numbers. Species reliant on krill like fur seals have had breeding failures as a result.

[Related: The East Antarctic Ice Sheet could raise sea levels 16 feet by 2500.]

“Our results show that while extreme events are known to impact the globe through heavy rainfall and flooding, heatwaves and wildfires, such as those seen in Europe this summer, they also impact the remote polar regions,” co-autor and University of Leeds professor of Earth observation Anna Hogg said in a statement. “Antarctic glaciers, sea ice and natural ecosystems are all impacted by extreme events. Therefore, it is essential that international treaties and policy are implemented in order to protect these beautiful but delicate regions.”

The study also calls for careful management of the area to protect vulnerable sites, as the retreat of the Antarctic sea ice sheet will make new areas of the region accessible by ships. Using the European Space Agency and European Commission’s Copernicus Sentinel satellites can provide regular monitoring of the entire Antarctic region and Southern Ocean, and can measure the ice. 

“Antarctic sea ice has been grabbing headlines in recent weeks, and this paper shows how sea ice records—first record highs but, since 2017, record lows—have been tumbling in Antarctica for several years,” study co-author and British Antarctic Survey sea ice expert Caroline Holmes said in a statement. “On top of that, there are deep interconnections between extreme events in different aspects of the Antarctic physical and biological system, almost all of them vulnerable to human influence in some way.”

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This article was originally featured on High Country News.

On a sweltering late April day, a flock of middle-aged men strolled in athleisure, practicing their backswings and rifling balls into the azure sky above the Green Springs golf community just outside St. George, a ballooning city of 100,000 in southwestern Utah. Some 2,000 homes, mostly single-family—many with RV garages—orbit the fairway, like rings around Planet Golf, and more are on their way. 

As in so many cities in the desert West, golf in St. George is a thirsty business, with a powerful lobby and a relationship with water painted in green on the landscape. Among its peers, however, St. George is in a league of its own. Few cities in the Southwest use more water per person: nearly 300 gallons a day. And a hefty portion of that, over half, goes to keeping ornamental grass, lawns and golf courses lush in an arid region where water supplies are dwindling every day. Within a decade, and without immediate action to conserve, local officials predict that its water shortage will become a water crisis.

Utah is notorious for granting an unusual degree of grace to this sort of profligate water use. That may be changing, however, at least when it comes to the golf industry: In 2022, the city of Ivins, an exurb of St. George, effectively banned the construction of new golf courses, while early this year, state Rep. Douglas Welton, R, introduced House Bill 188, which could require golf courses to be more transparent about how much water they use.

In a city and at a time where something’s gotta give, will golf be the first to fall?

Minutes down the road from the Green Springs community, at the Dixie Red Hills Golf Course, I joined a group of older players staging behind the first tee. Before we settled on the griddle-hot pleather of our golf carts, Jim Peacock, 80, slapped a top-spinning rocket up and over the rough that his friend Craig Felt, two years his senior, couldn’t help but admire. “Jim’s the athlete of the group,” Felt said. Soon, the chatter moved to water. “When I was in Mexico, there was only enough water for three flushes. That could happen to us if we don’t pay attention,” Felt said. While Tom Smith, 75, indicated that he’d rather give up golf than toilet-flushing, it’s not clear that the rest of the community is so inclined. “This is a place where a lot of people do a lot of golfing,” Greg Milne said, gesturing toward the sprawl of St. George.   

“That’s how it started. The course was built as a sort of vision for growth in the area.” 

This area’s mingling of desert and water has long attracted people. Southern Paiute bands lived near the Virgin River for a millennium or more before Mormon colonists arrived in the late 1850s, intent on making “Utah’s Dixie” bloom with cotton. For the next century, Washington County remained “a sleepy little community off the I-15 that people would pass by on their way to California,” said Colby Cowan, director of golf operations for the city of St. George. Throughout the 1950s, nuclear blasts at Nevada’s Yucca Flats test range blew radioactive dust onto the homes of the city’s 5,000 residents—dust that stubbornly clung to the valley’s reputation.

But in 1965, St. George unveiled the nine-hole Dixie Red Hills course, rebranding the Mormon Downwinder outpost as a putter’s paradise. “That’s how it started. The course was built as a sort of vision for growth in the area,” said Cowan. Since then, golf’s role in the regional recreation economy has burgeoned. The 14 golf courses in Washington County, including four owned by the city of St. George, attract nearly 600,000 visitors a year, generating $130 million dollars annually, according to Cowan. That puts golf on par with mining, quarrying, and oil and gas industries in the area, though still below the half-billion dollars generated annually by Zion National Park.

And, like those other industries, golf has political sway. When golf’s water needs came under fire in Washington County in 2021 and again in the state Legislature this January, the industry flexed its influence. Golf Alliance Utah, the lobbying wing of the Utah Golf Association, pulled strings at the Statehouse in Salt Lake City, killing the bill even after sponsors dropped the annual reporting requirement, arguing that it unfairly targeted the sport. 

Generally, the golf industry tries to burnish its image by touting its economic benefits and highlighting its efforts to decrease water use. “We’re doing our due diligence with water conservation,” Devin Dehlin, the executive director at the Utah Section Professional Golf Association, said in a call with High Country News. “What the sport brings economic-wise is the story we want to tell.” In practice, those changes have come down to encouraging course operators to replace some turf with native plants. Other technologies, like soil-moisture monitoring and artificial grass coloring, which gives turf a deep green appearance with minimal watering, are being adopted, though strictly on a voluntary basis. Dehlin said his organization does not track how widespread these changes are.

Of the ten thirstiest golf courses in Utah, seven are in Washington County, according to an investigation by the Salt Lake Tribune. Some privately owned courses, including Coral Canyon Golf Course and SunRiver Golf Club, actually increased their water use between 2018 and 2022. The mercury tops 100 degrees Fahrenheit here more than 50 days each year, so it takes an exorbitant amount of water to keep the fairways lush year-round: about 177 million gallons annually for each course, or roughly eight times the national average. And if the region continues to grow at its current breakneck rate, existing water supplies—from wells, springs and the Virgin River — will be severely strained. That prospect has some local and state officials backing a proposed pipeline that would carry Colorado River water from the ever-shrinking Lake Powell to this corner of the Utah desert. With or without the pipeline, the region is likely to face severe water rationing, with golf and lawns likely seeing the first cuts. Washington County’s forthcoming drought contingency plan could require cities to cut their water use by up to 30 percent in a worst-case scenario. “And if you look about where they would cut their water usage,” said Washington County Water Conservancy District Manager Zach Renstrom, “it really would come to large grassy areas, such as golf.”

In a bid to avoid future mandated cuts, St. George is scrambling to reduce its water use now. Under Renstrom’s guidance, the city passed sweeping conservation ordinances early this year—the toughest in Utah, but still mild compared to those in Las Vegas. Three of the four city-owned golf courses now use treated wastewater for irrigation rather than potable or “culinary” grade water. Las Vegas shifted to reused water for the majority of its courses by 2008. Cowan said the city-owned courses are beginning to remove ornamental grass from non-play areas. So far this year, the county has removed more than 264,000 square feet of grass. While that may sound like a lot, it’s only about six acres across the entire county, or roughly 4 percent of one local golf course. Even with those measures in place, Renstom says the halcyon days for golf in southwestern Utah need to end: “I’ve had a couple of developers come to me recently and want to talk about golf courses, and I flat-out said, ‘I won’t provide the water.’”

For now, though, the county still has some water to spare. St. George has secured $60 million for a wastewater treatment plant, all while stashing almost two years of reserves in a network of reservoirs. “We have a lot of water stored away,” said Ed Andrechak, water program manager for Conserve Southwest Utah, a sustainability advocacy nonprofit. If the county enforced the strict conservation rules that Las Vegas has, he believes it could grow at the blistering pace it’s projected to over the coming years.

But Andrechak worries that, ultimately, a culture of profligacy will be the barrier to conservation, not money or technical know-how: “We just don’t think water rules apply to us here,” he said. Andrechak cataloged a number of examples: a 1,200-foot lazy river under construction at the Black Desert golf resort in Ivins; the Desert Color community, which built around an artificial lake that Andrechak described as a “giant evapo-pond”; another three man-made lakes for the Southern Shores water-skiing-housing complex in Hurricane, and perhaps most bewildering, a Yogi Bear-themed water park east of St. George. The water park will require 5 million gallons or more of culinary-grade drinking water annually for rides like one nicknamed the “Royal Flush,” a toilet bowl-shaped slide. The Sand Hollow golf course next door gulps up 60 times as much water. “We’re 23 years into a mega drought, and yet my struggle here is that we’re not really that concerned about it,” Andrechak said. “That’s the culture.”

“We’re 23 years into a mega drought, and yet my struggle here is that we’re not really that concerned about it.”

This culture is enabled and even nurtured by policy: St. George’s water rates are among the lowest in the West, which results in bigger profits for course operators and more affordable green fees, but also disincentivizes conservation. “The whole idea has been to have low (water) rates to take care of the citizens by making golf affordable,” said Dehlin. “Having affordable water is important for the growth of the game and to keep our facilities in the conditions that we do. And that’s one thing about golf courses in Utah in general: they’re very well-manicured, very well-kept,” Dehlin said. “And yes, well-irrigated.” 

Samuel Shaw is an editorial intern for High Country News based in the Colorado Front Range. Email him at samuel.shaw@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy. Follow Samuel on Instagram @youngandforgettable. 

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Scientists are already calculating that July 2023 will be the hottest month on record—and likely the warmest month that humanity has ever experienced. The United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service announced late last week that this month’s heat was beyond record-smashing. The planet’s temperature, they report, has been temporarily passing over the crucial threshold of limiting global warming to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) above pre-industrial temperatures.

[Related: Extreme heat warning extends to more than 100 million people in the US.]

This news comes as no surprise to the millions of people around the world facing extreme heat. Phoenix, Arizona is about to enter its 31st straight day of temperatures above 110 degrees. Parts of northwest China saw a record-breaking 126 degrees earlier this month, while southern Europe is seeing wildfires following an extreme heatwave. These global heat waves would be “virtually impossible” without climate change, according to an early analysis released last week by the World Weather Attribution initiative.

“We can say that the first three weeks of July have been the warmest three week periods ever observed in our record,” Carlo Buentempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, said via Zoom and in a statement. “This anomaly is so large with respect to other record-breaking months in our record that we are virtually certain that the month, the month as a whole, will become the warmest July on record, the warmest month on record, in all likelihood.”

Records like these generally track average air temperature across the entire world and are broken by hundredths of a degrees. However, the temperature for July’s first 23 days averaged 62.51 degrees, higher than the 61.93 degrees set in July 2019, according to the UN’s report. The data for these records goes back to 1940, but many scientists believe that it is almost certain that these recent readings are the warmest the Earth has been in 120,000 years, based on the data collected from coral reefs, deep sea sediment cores, and tree rings that paint a picture of past climates. 

Buontempo and other scientists believe that the steamy weather can be attributed to a combination of human-caused climate change and this year’s natural El Niño warming pattern in parts of the central Pacific. This pattern changes weather around the world and follows three straight years of La Niña, a Pacific cooling pattern. Despite multiple La Niña cooling patterns, 2015 to 2022 saw eight of the warmest years on record based on a 173 year long dataset. WMO’s Director of Climate Services Chris Hewitt cited “a clear and dramatic warming decade on decade” since the 1970s. 

[Related: World set to ‘temporarily’ breach major climate threshold in next five years.]

“But now the La Niña has ended” – to be replaced by the sea-warming El Niño effect – waters have begun to heat up in the tropical Pacific, bringing the “almost certain likelihood that one of the next five years will be the warmest on record,” Hewitt said in a statement. 

In May, WMO scientists predicted that the world will likely temporarily exceed the 2.7 degree threshold for at least one of the next five years. 

Temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean have also been skyrocketing since the spring. In mid-May, the global ocean surface temperatures reached “unprecedented levels” for the time of year and the ocean temperatures off the coast of Florida reached 100 degrees in some locations. 

UN Secretary-General António Guterres underscored the need for global action to reduce  emissions, climate adaptations, and climate finance. He warned that “the era of global warming has ended” and “the era of global boiling has arrived.”

“We can still stop the worst,” said Guterres. “But to do so we must turn a year of burning heat into a year of burning ambition.” 

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Oceans all over the world rely on a delicate balance of different elements to remain stable: Temperature, salinity, pH, and pressure all combine to create the complex bodies of water that maintain conditions for marine life and define the planet. Climate change has altered those conditions though, by warming oceans to record high temperatures and introducing more freshwater through sea-ice and glacier melt. 

Now, new research published on Tuesday warns that a vital Atlantic Ocean system could collapse by 2060, setting off one of the planet’s tipping points, or potential points of no return. That collapse could eventually spell catastrophe for the people who live in countries that border the Atlantic Ocean, leading to increased sea-level rise in the United States, decreased temperatures and altered storm patterns over western Europe, rejiggered climate and agricultural zones, and hotter ocean temperatures in the Caribbean. 

The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, contradicts findings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, the United Nations’ scientific collaboration that publishes reports on the state of climate change. The group’s latest assessment, released last year, found the collapse of the group of Atlantic Ocean currents to be unlikely given the group only acknowledges weakening of the AMOC starting in 2004. The report states that scientists cannot say when or if a collapse will happen since they state even the decline prior to the 2000s cannot necessarily be attributed to climate change. 

“We absolutely have deep respect for the IPCC report,” Susanne Ditlevsen, a statistician at the University of Copenhagen and co-author of the study, told Grist. “When we first started, we had this idea that we could use this method that’s data-based, to kind of confirm what the IPCC report is saying. So when we actually got our first results, we were very surprised, and we didn’t believe them.” 

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, is a thick band of water that travels from the Gulf of Mexico north along the southeastern U.S. before heading up the western edge of Europe, carrying mild temperatures with it, and onward toward Greenland and Iceland. Once there, the current is infused with heavy, cold, and salty water that then sinks, traveling back down the coast of the U.S. This system provides what one expert with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, called “symmetry” to temperatures in the North and South hemispheres. 

But as carbon dioxide levels rise, temperatures increase, and ice melts in the Arctic, this current is being inundated with freshwater, throwing it out of balance. This has led to a weakening of the AMOC, which recently saw its slowest point in 1,600 years in 2021. 

If the web of Atlantic Ocean currents stopped, it would constitute one of the Earth’s tipping points, which signal a dramatic, potentially irreversible shift in the condition of the planet — and its habitability for humans. A study last year found that the planet has already passed a few tipping points, including tropical coral die off and the beginning of the Greenland ice sheet collapse, at just 1.1 degree Celsius (1.9 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming. 

“We’re talking huge, huge climate changes in a very short time,” said Ditlevsen. “We would have an increase in the tropical areas… If you already have a very high, medium temperature and it rises even higher — and that is on top of global warming. Just imagine; we have 3 billion people living there. That is a huge problem.” 

The AMOC has stopped before, about 12,000 years ago and led to a variation of about 10 to 15 degrees C (18 to 27 degrees F) within a decade. But that was during an ice age, and modern global warming is a vastly different situation. 

The new research finds that this disintegration of the AMOC could occur as soon as 2025, or as far as 2095. While the findings are striking, scientists not involved in the research are approaching them cautiously.

Rong Zhang, an ocean scientist at NOAA, is skeptical of the methods used in the paper. She is particularly cautious about saying that the collapse will happen this century, let alone that it is imminent. The study uses historical records from the last 150 years to demonstrate that the weakening of the Atlantic ocean current is accelerating. But high-quality observations of this system of currents was only established in 2004, which provides a much smaller time-period to draw from.

“We need more direct AMOC observations to give us a real picture and a real early-warning signal,” she said.

Marcos Tedesco, an oceanographer and professor at Columbia University, can see both sides of the argument. 

Climate change necessitates that science can remain nimble and understand its increasing and exponential effects on the earth, but also science’s precision and thorough nature of processes, like peer review, help establish and keep its authority on certain subjects, according to Tedesco. 

Tedesco also notes that all the unknowns of climate change will only continue to complicate how much we can predict and measure all of those changes. 

“The Earth is changing,” said Tedesco. “And it’s changing into a direction where it’s never been before, because it’s never moved so fast into that direction. And this, of course, is because of the CO2 that’s been pushed in the atmosphere in the past 100 years.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/climate/a-vital-atlantic-ocean-system-could-collapse/.

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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Extreme heat waves roaring across North America, Europe, and China this month were exacerbated by climate change, according to an early analysis released July 25 by the World Weather Attribution (WWA) initiative. The group,  an international group of volunteer scientists who assess climate change’s role in extreme weather, says that the heat baking parts of the United States and southern Europe would not have occurred without climate change. Additionally, they write that climate change made China’s historic heat wave at least 50 times more likely.

[Related: How ‘underground climate change’ affects life on the Earth’s surface.]

“Had there been no climate change, such an event would almost never have occurred,” study lead author Mariam Zachariah, a climate scientist at Imperial College of London, told the AP.  Zachariah called heat waves in Europe and North America “virtually impossible” without climate-change induced temperature rises. 

Since July began, dangerous heat waves have killed livestock and crops, triggered wildfires, stressed hospitals, and are responsible for multiple deaths across three continents. More than 100 people have died from the heat in Mexico since March, while Death Valley, California hit 128 degrees Fahrenheit  this month. China posted an all-time national temperature record of 126 degrees Fahrenheit earlier this month, while parts of Italy and Spain are moving towards Europe’s all time record of 119.8 degrees. The city of Phoenix, Arizona is expected to experience its 26th consecutive day with temperatures above 110 degrees today, smashing a record of 18 days set in 1974. 

In this new analysis, the WWA team examined weather data and computer model simulations to compare the Earth’s current climate, which has warmed about 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit since the late 1800s, with the climate of the past.  The study found that not only has climate change increased the likelihood of these heat waves happening, but it is making them hotter. Earth’s stagnant atmosphere, warmed by carbon dioxide and other gasses, made Europe’s heatwave 4.5 degrees hotter, China’s 1.8 degrees warmer, and the southern US and Mexico’s heatwave 3.6 degrees hotter. 

Extreme heat waves like these are expected once every 15 years for the US and Mexico, once every 10 years in Southern Europe, and once every five years for China, according to the analysis.  “They are not rare in today’s climate,” WWA co-leader and Imperial College London climate scientist Friederike Otto told The Washington Post. “What surprises me is that people are so surprised. It is exactly what we expected to see.” 

[Related: A cap on ‘luxury’ emissions could make a clean energy transition fairer.]

Otto added that the findings support a growing scientific consensus that the warmer the world gets, crippling heat waves, stronger storms, and climate-fueled disasters will be only more likely. 

While dire, this study should not be interpreted as evidence of “climate collapse” or as a situation we are powerless to stop, according to the team. The report stressed that we still have time to do something about climate change, but society must quickly reduce emissions of planet-heating pollution. They also encouraged countries and cities around the world to adapt sustainable energy systems, urban planning, and public health initiatives to better prepare for the extreme heat to come. 

“We still have time to secure a safe and healthy future, but we urgently need to stop burning fossil fuels and invest in decreasing vulnerability,” Otto told CNN. “If we do not, tens of thousands of people will keep dying from heat-related causes each year.” 

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As climate heats up and historic wildfires devastate our planet, finding new, sustainable ways of protecting people and ecosystems from growing fire concerns is crucial. Over the last few years, mycelium, a root-like structure of fungi strands, has become one of technology’s darlings as an ingredient for growable computers, building materials, and leather. Most recently, researchers at Australia’s Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology have made promising strides in turning the unique substance into fire-resistant roofing. 

[Related: Inside the lab that’s growing mushroom computers.]

“The great thing about mycelium is that it forms a thermal protective char layer when exposed to fire or radiant heat,” RMIT professor Everson Kandare, an expert in the flammability and thermal properties of biomaterials, said in a statement. “The longer and the higher temperature at which mycelium char survives, the better its use as a fireproof material.”

Kandare and his colleagues published their research on mycelium as a fireproofing agent in the journal Polymer Degradation and Stability earlier this month. The team was able to create paper-thin sheets of mycelium from edible Basidiomycota fungi in containers of sugary sweet molasses. They then added sodium hydroxide to convert the chitin in the mycelium into chitosan. 

When exposed to flames of nearly 1500 degrees Fahrenheit, according to New Scientist, the chitosan quickly turned into a protective layer of char. “The material caught fire for about one second then self-extinguished,” coauthor Tien Huynh told New Scientist. 

[Related: Fungi spores and knitting combine to make a durable and sustainable building material.]

Many composite cladding panels these days contain plastics, which are a nightmare for human and ecological health when they burn. “Bromide, iodide, phosphorus and nitrogen-containing fire retardants are effective, but have adverse health and environmental effects,” Kandare said in the release. “They pose health and environmental concerns, as carcinogens and neurotoxins that can escape and persist in the environment cause harm to plant and animal life.” Instead, according to the researchers, their mushroom solution only emits water and carbon dioxide.

Of course, plastics are considerably cheaper and easier to produce than growing mushrooms, but Huynh added in the release that leftover organic waste from the growing mushroom industry could one day help bring products like this to scale. 

“Collaborating with the mushroom industry would remove the need for new farms while producing products that meet fire safety needs in a sustainable way,” Huynh said.

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On Tuesday July 18, an ongoing volcanic eruption in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands produced a large ash cloud that prompted National Weather Service warnings to pilots regarding potentially dangerous conditions. Volcanic ash can cause a jet engine to shut down due to the spray’s angular and sharp texture.

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

The Alaska Volcano Observatory said the ash cloud was initially about 5.5 miles high and was reported following an eruption of the Shishaldin Volcano. Ash emissions fell below 1.9 miles by the afternoon, and the alert for pilots was downgraded. As of Wednesday morning Eastern time, the volcano is at an orange alert level. 

Mount Shishaldin began erupting on July 11, with a US Coast Guard flight confirming increased lava eruptions within the summit crater, according to reporting from the Associated Press. On Friday July 14, a significant explosion produced an ash cloud that hit up to 7.5 miles high that drifted south towards the Pacific Ocean preceding a second smaller explosion.  

The volcano is about 700 miles southwest of the city of Anchorage and towards the center of Unimak Island. The island is home to roughly 65 residents who live in the community of False Pass, about 25 miles northeast of the volcano.

Mt. Shishaldin is one of the most active volcanoes in the Aleutian Arc, a 1,553 mile long line of 80 volcanic mountains with 41 that have been active since at least 1760. The arc stretches along the southern end of the Bering Sea onto the Alaskan Peninsula and is the boundary between the Pacific and North American tectonic plates.

The symmetric cone volcano has a base diameter of 10 miles and a 660-foot funnel-shaped crater that often emits steam and the occasional bit of ash. Mt. Shishaldin has erupted at least 26 times since 1824. Most of these eruptions have been small, with one in 1999 producing an ash cloud that reached 8.5 miles. 

[Related: How scientists helped Alaska’s “Rat Island” shake off its namesake rodents.]

According to the US Army Corps of Engineers, volcanoes have been both constructive and destructive influences on the Aleutian Arc. The eruptions have helped create islands through ash and fresh lava flows, but have also destroyed islands. The island of Bogoslof in the eastern side of the Aleutians is one that has seen rapid construction and destruction that has influenced its shape over time.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) encourages those living in the face of any active volcano to evacuate if told to, shelter in place by sealing all doors and windows, and maintain a disaster supply kit. 

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More than 100 million people across the US were under heat warnings this weekend, as a large heat dome pushes temperatures to extremes with few signs of relief. The excessive heat warnings and advisories stretch from the Pacific Northwest into California, parts of the Southern Plains, Central Gulf Coast, and southern tip of Florida, according to the National Weather Service (NWS). 

[Related: How to stay cool if you lose power during a heatwave.]

On Sunday July 17, Phoenix saw its 17th consecutive day of temperature of 110 degrees Fahrenheit or higher, putting the city on track to beat the longest stretch of such intense heat. The previous record of 18 days in a row above 110 degrees was set in 1974. Temperatures soared to 118 degrees on Sunday, and area hospitals reported patient surges and overcrowding. 

“This is the worst summer in recent memory,” Valleywise Health emergency medicine physician Frank LoVecchio told NBC News. “I’ve been working here since 1996, this same hospital, and this is one of the worst summers because we’ve had so many days in a row … this super warm weather.”

Heat has killed at least 12 people in Phoenix so far this year.

In Las Vegas, Harry Reid International Airport reached 100 degrees as early as 8:40 a.m. on Sunday, then briefly hitting 116—tying the record for July 16 set in 1998. Meteorologists urged residents to not underestimate the risk of days-long heat waves as temperatures are expected to tie or beat records. 

“This heatwave is not typical desert heat due to its long duration, extreme daytime temperatures and warm nights. Everyone needs to take this heat seriously, including those who live in the desert,” warned the NWS Las Vegas.

Death Valley, California saw temperatures of 128 degrees on Sunday, surpassing the daily record by a single degree in one of the hottest places on Earth. 

Heat domes, like the one responsible for all of this misery, are strong high-pressure systems that stay put over a large swath of land and trap hot ocean air. In the US, their main cause is a strong change (or gradient) in ocean temperatures from west to east in the tropical Pacific Ocean during the preceding winter, according to NOAA. 

The air descends to the ground, compresses, and then significantly warms. This cycle can continue for days or weeks, and it discourages cloud formation making for  very little coverage blocking the sun’s energy. Moisture typically evaporates at the beginning of a heat dome, but the moisture will eventually deplete.

[Related: ‘Unprecedented’ ocean temperatures and extreme heat waves pop up around the globe.]

“There is no cloud cover, there is a lot of solar radiation coming in, there is no precipitation,” climate scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Claudia Tebaldi, told Wired. “You also trigger this feedback—you dry the soil, and there is no way for things to cool down by evaporation.”

According to an analysis from science communication nonprofit Climate Central, today’s persistent heat is at least five times more likely due to climate change. The recent arrival of a naturally occurring El Niño weather pattern is also bringing hotter weather around the world. El Niño can also exacerbate warmer temperatures caused by the burning of fossil fuels and other greenhouse gas emissions.

“With global warming, such temperatures are becoming more and more likely to occur,” Ceverny, the World Meteorological Organization’s records coordinator, told the Associated Press. “Long-term: Global warming is causing higher and more frequent temperature extremes. Short-term: This particular weekend is being driven by a very very strong upper-level ridge of high pressure over the Western US.”

To stay safe, Ready.gov recommends learning to identify the signs of heat-related illnesses, finding places to keep cool like libraries and cooling centers, and taking cool showers or baths. You can also stay cool without air conditioning by keeping your body moist and keeping sunlight out by covering your windows. 

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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, however, 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. 

[Related: One of the world’s driest places just saw record flooding]

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. 

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. 

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

Pay attention to flash flood watches, which the National Weather Service issues to indicate when conditions could result in flash flooding. If you’re in the affected area, 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, you and everyone else 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. The US Department of Homeland Security has a handy guide that will help you create a plan. 

For more tips like these, check out FEMA’s flood information sheet. 

What is a 100-year flood?

To describe the likelihood of weather disasters, meteorologists might use terms such as a “100-year flood” or “100-year storm”—or reference an even longer timescale to indicate a greater rarity. April’s South Florida flooding, for instance, which swamped the region after it received 26 inches of rain in a day, was labeled a “1-in-1,000 year event.”

But those descriptors can be somewhat misleading, as the US Geological Survey explains. Instead, hydrologists prefer to think of these as statistical “recurrence intervals,” in which a “100-year flood” occurs with about 1 percent probability in any given year. (A 50-year storm has a probability of 2 percent, while a 500-year storm translates to odds of 0.2 percent that this much rain would fall.) 

To put it another way: A 100-year flood, while rare, allows for the possibility that multiple such floods could occur within the same rainy season. It doesn’t mean that, if such a flood passes through an area, that spot is safe from a deluge for another 99 years. 

This story has been updated. It was originally published on August 3, 2022.

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Rescue and clean up efforts are underway in New York and Vermont after widespread flash flooding and torrential rain inundated the region over the last two days. Roadways have been washed away, multiple homes and businesses were flooded, as rivers and creek beds raged.

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

In New York’s Hudson Valley, up to eight inches of rain fell in some areas on Sunday, causing at least one death. On Monday, the National Weather Service said over 13 million Americans were under flood watches and warnings, as the storms stretched from eastern New York State into Boston, Massachusetts and western Maine. 

The flooding was reminiscent of the devastation left after the remnants of Hurricane Irene, which moved into the landlocked and mountainous state as a tropical storm in 2011. The results flooded many of Vermont’s small and isolated towns built along creeks and rivers and killed six people. 

In a news conference on Monday, Vermont Governor Phil Scott said this week’s system could surpass the amount that fell during Irene.  “What’s different for me is that Irene lasted about 24 hours,” Scott said at a news conference on Monday, according to The New York Times. “We’re getting just as much rain, if not more, and it’s going on for days. That’s my concern. It’s not just the initial damage.”

Some of the worst-hit areas in Vermont included Londonderry, Weston, and Ludlow, in the southern central part of the Green Mountain State. The state capital of Montpelier was also not spared from the flooding, with the downtown area under four to seven feet of water as the Winooski River swelled. The river eclipsed the levels seen during Irene and crested at 20.88 feet on Monday in the capital. It is expected to crest in Essex Junction on Tuesday afternoon.

Vermont Emergency Management officials said rescue crews had conducted more than 50 rescues and evacuated more people and pets from flooded homes as of Monday evening. 

“All our evacuations are vulnerable populations that do not want to leave. That’s what we’re seeing here, as well,” said Mike Cannon, coordinator of Vermont’s Urban Search and Rescue, according to WCAX. “This is particularly going to be difficult for us with the long rain event that we are going to experience.”

Cannon said that the help is on the way from teams in Massachusetts and North Carolina that bring with them a “large water rescue component, as well as a search component.” These teams can go into communities and do welfare checks that are expected to continue for several more days.  

[Related: The future of hurricanes is full of floods—a lot of them.]

The storm is the latest example of how catastrophic flooding likely fueled by climate change can hit anywhere. The air can hold more moisture as temperatures rise, leading to more severe rainfall that floods places that aren’t situated close to major bodies of water, including states like Vermont. Experts suggest that the catastrophic flooding in Pakistan last summer that left one third of the country under water and killed over 1,000 people was exacerbated by climate change. 

A 2022 study from the University of Vermont found that flooding along the Winooski River can be expected to cause more than $2 billion in property damage in the next 100 years. When climate change is factored in, the total increased to $5.29 billion. The region is home to over 140,000 Vermonters and the study found that this flooding could also become more frequent. An additional study published in October 2022 found that rain storms are getting more intense across the United States.

Burlington, Vermont has also been considered a potential future “climate haven,” as people may potentially begin to migrate away from the sea level rise-plagued coast, up to the north to escape heat, and away from the wildfire-prone Western United States. Other possible climate haven cities cited by Tulane University real estate professor Jesse Keenan in 2022 include Asheville, North Carolina, Madison in Wisconsin, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) recommends that families have an emergency preparedness plan ready for floods, including where to seek shelter, evacuation routes, and a communication plan. It is also critical to never walk, swim, or drive through a flooded area and stay up to date on the latest information about water totals and evacuation.

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As the planet warms up and oceans rise, extreme weather events are becoming the norm. Increasingly severe hurricanes bring wind damage and flooding when they make landfall. And just this week the world dealt with the three hottest days ever recorded.

Getting notified in time to prepare for a catastrophic hurricane or heat wave—like the recent scorcher in the southern and midwestern US, where daily temperatures soared up to 112 degrees F—could be the difference between life and death. The problem is that predicting the weather, even day-to-day events, can still be a gamble. AI can help.

A pair of studies published July 5 in the journal Nature described the usefulness of two AI models that could improve weather forecasting. The first AI-based system is called Pangu-Weather, and it was capable of predicting global weather a week in advance. The second, NowcastNet, creates accurate predictions for rainfall up to six hours ahead, which would allow meteorologists to better study weather patterns in real-time.

Pangu-Weather and other methods demonstrate AI’s potential for extreme weather warnings, especially for less developed countries, explains Lingxi Xie, a senior researcher at Huawei Cloud in China and a coauthor for one of the studies.”

A majority of countries use numerical weather prediction models, which use mathematical equations to create computer simulations of the atmosphere and oceans. When you look at AccuWeather or the weather app on your phone, data from numerical weather predictions is used to predict future weather. Russ Schumacher, a climatologist at Colorado State University who was not involved in both studies, hails these forecasting tools as a major scientific success story, decades in the making. “They have enabled major advances in forecasts and forecasts continue to get more accurate as a result of more data, improvements to these models, and more advanced computers.”   

But Xie notes that “AI offers advantages in numerical weather prediction being orders of magnitudes faster than conventional, simulation-based models.” The numerical models often do not have the capacity to predict extreme weather hazards such as tornadoes or hail. What’s more, unlike AI systems, it takes a lot of computational power and hours to produce a single simulation.

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

To train the Pangu-Weather model, Xie and his colleagues fed 39 years of global weather data to the system, preparing it to forecast temperature, pressure, and wind speed. When compared to the numerical weather prediction method, Pangu-Weather was 10,000 times faster, and was no less accurate. Pangu-Weather also contains a 3D model, unlike past AI forecasting systems, that allows it to record atmospheric states at different pressure levels to further increase its accuracy. 

Pangu-Weather can predict weather patterns five to seven days in advance. However, the AI model cannot forecast precipitation—which it would need to do to predict tornadoes and other extreme events. The second Nature study fills this gap with their model, NowcastNet.

NowcastNet, unlike Pangu-Weather, focuses on detailed, realistic descriptions of extreme rainfall patterns in local regions. NowcastNet uses radar observations from the US and China, as well as deep learning methods, to predict precipitation rates over a 1.6-million-square-mile region of the eastern and central US up to 3 hours in advance. Additionally, 62 meteorologists from China tested NowcastNet and ranked it first, out of four other leading weather forecasting methods, in reliably predicting heavy rain, which it did 71 percent of the time.

[Related: Vandals, angry artists, and mustachioed tinkerers: The story of New York City’s weather forecasting castle]

“All of these generative AI models are promising,” says Amy McGovern, the director of the National Science Foundation AI Institute for Research on Trustworthy AI in Weather, Climate, and Coastal Oceanography, who was not affiliated with either study. But these AI models will need some refinement before they can fully replace current weather forecasting systems.

The first concern McGovern raises is the lack of physics-based mathematical equations. Accounting for the physics of moisture, air, and heat moving through the atmosphere would generate more accurate predictions. “These papers are still a proof-of-concept,” she says, “and don’t use the laws of physics to predict extreme weather.” A second concern, and major downside to AI tech in general, is coded bias. An AI is only as good as the data it is fed. If it is trained with low-quality data or with information that is non-representative of a certain region, the AI forecaster could be less accurate in one region while still being helpful in another.

As AI continues to expand into different facets of life, from art to medicine, meteorology won’t be left out. While the current AI systems require further development, McGovern is making her own prediction of the future: “Give it 5 to 10 years, we are going to be amazed at what these models can do.”

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Monday July 3, 2023 was possibly the hottest day ever recorded by humans, according to preliminary data from the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer Project. The average global temperature reached 63.62 degrees Fahrenheit, beating out the previous record of 62.46 degrees set back in August 2016. According to some experts, this is yet another sign of the worsening global climate crisis.

[Related: Extreme heat to blanket Texas with ‘no end in sight.’]

The Climate Reanalyzer is a common tool climate scientists often use to get a sense of the world’s temperatures. This data visualization model is based on a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) computer simulations intended to create forecasts and uses satellite data. Its predictions are based on using a weather tool for forecasting and not on the ground record keeping. 

Much of the planet has been settled into the dog days of summer. For over a week, a large swath of the southern United States has been stuck under an intense heat dome and wildfires near the Oregon and Washington State border are quickly spreading.  These extreme weather patterns have likely been exacerbated by human-caused climate change, combined with an emerging El Niño pattern. El Niño is a temporary natural warming of parts of the central Pacific Ocean that changes and affects weather patterns around the globe and generally makes Earth hotter and heat waves more intense. 

High temperature records were beaten July 3 and 4 in both Quebec and northwestern Canada, as well as further south in Peru. 

Beijing, China has recorded nine straight days last week with temperatures above 95 degrees, while North Africa is seeing temperatures at around 122 degrees. Currently experiencing its winter, even Antarctica isn’t spared from unusual heat. Ukraine’s Vernadsky Research Base in Antarctica’s Argentine Islands recently broke its July temperature record with 47.6 degrees. 

“Unfortunately, it [this record] promises to only be the first in a series of new records set this year as increasing emissions of [carbon dioxide] and greenhouse gasses coupled with a growing El Nino event push temperatures to new highs,” Berkeley Earth research scientist Zeke Hausfather said in a statement, reported by Reuters. 

[Related: ‘Unprecedented’ ocean temperatures and extreme heat waves pop up around the globe.]

This week’s global record is preliminary and is awaiting approval from NOAA. Climate scientists typically use longer time frames of months, years, and decades to track the planet’s warming and this preliminary record is based on data that goes back to 1979 when satellites record-keeping began, while NOAA’s date goes back to 1880. “In the climate assessment community, I don’t think we’d assign the kind of gravitas to a single day observation as we would a month or a year,’’ National Center for Environmental Information (a NOAA division) director Deke Arndt told the Associated Press.

However, some experts still see this as an indication that climate change is heading into some uncharted waters as heat waves get more frequent and intense. 

“They are getting hotter,” Climate Analytics scientist and Columbia University adjunct scientist Kai Kornhuber, told NPR on June 28 when discussing the South’s heatwave. “They are occurring at a higher frequency, so that also increases the likelihood of sequential heat waves.”

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Extreme heat is scorching the deep South, as multiple deaths have already been reported across several states, including a Dallas postal worker and a 62-year-old woman in Caddo Parish, Louisiana.

The heat index on Wednesday, or how the temperature feels with humidity considered, was expected to be 122 degrees Fahrenheit in some parts of New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana. One heat-induced storm created a tornado that killed three in Matador, Texas on Wednesday night. Storms in the Tulsa, Oklahoma region lead to the “highest-volume day ever, in our history” for Emergency Medical Services in the area on Wednesday. 

[Related: Heat is the silent killer we should all be worried about.]

“This chaos is our reality right now,” Adam Paluka, a spokesman for the Emergency Medical Services Authority in Tulsa, told the New York Times. 

Earlier this week, the heat triggered a series of tornadoes and storms leaving hundreds of thousands of people without power. As of Thursday morning, 104,679 Texan homes were without power, including two regions in the central part of the state with nearly county-wide electric outages. 

The intense heat dome is expected to continue into the remainder of the week, and possibly into the Fourth of July holiday. According to the New York Times, this heat dome is the result of a high-pressure ridge in the atmosphere. NOAA’s weather prediction center stated Thursday morning that “there is really no end in sight for the excessive heat that has plagued particularly Texas/southeastern New Mexico in recent days.” Going into next week, NOAA continues, 100 degree or higher heat could expand further east into the Lower Mississippi Valley (which includes parts of Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri and Tennessee, according to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation). The Desert Southwest could also see similarly high temperatures on par with predictions for what is the region’s hottest season of the year. 

Extreme heat waves, such as the one in the US and elsewhere on the planet, are affected by multiple factors, including climate change and El Niño climate patterns which have been on the National Weather Service’s radar since earlier this summer. While El Niño is a naturally occurring climate event, combined with the effects of climate change, the potential impacts could make 2023 the hottest year in human history. 

“The Earth’s natural climate cycle and climate caused by humans are not independent of each other,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA, told PopSci in May.

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

Heat waves can cause a multitude of health risks for people, either directly from exposure to extreme temperatures or the results of power outages. In both cases, marginalized communities experience greater risks due to preexisting energy insecurity. 

“As our grid ages and climate change worsens, we need to understand who power outages affect,” Joan Casey, an assistant professor of environmental and occupational health sciences at the University of Washington, told PopSci in May.

If you are in a region that is currently experiencing extreme heat and unreliable electrical services, watch for signs of heat stroke or exhaustion, drink lots of liquids, and try to cool down your home in case of electric grid failure.

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There’s only one day to go before the official start of summer in the Northern Hemisphere—but some parts of the planet are already feeling the heat. Ocean temperatures are about nine degrees above normal in parts of the United Kingdom and Ireland, while India and parts of the southern United States are baking under record breaking heat. Here’s what you need to know. 

[Related: Summer is off to an extreme start—here’s why.]

‘Unheard of’ marine heatwave

The waters off the coasts of the United Kingdom and Ireland are several degrees above normal, particularly in the North Sea and north Atlantic Ocean. Global sea surface temperatures in April and May hit an all time high for those months according to records dating back to 1850. June is also on track to hit record heat levels, with the water in some areas off the coast of England up to nine degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius) above normal. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), parts of the North Sea are in a category four marine heatwave, which is considered “extreme.”

“The extreme and unprecedented temperatures show the power of the combination of human-induced warming and natural climate variability like El Niño,” University of Bristol earth scientist Daniela Schmidt told The Guardian.  “While marine heatwaves are found in warmer seas like the Mediterranean, such anomalous temperatures in this part of the north Atlantic are unheard of. They have been linked to less dust from the Sahara but also the North Atlantic climate variability, which will need further understanding to unravel.”

This heat is putting marine organisms at risk, and events like this will only continue if carbon emissions are not dramatically cut, according to Schmidt.

Southern heatwave–and severe weather–in the US

Over the holiday weekend, heat indexes in parts of Texas soared above 120 degrees Fahrenheit, breaking records. More records are expected to fall this week as the power grid strains. Over 40 million people were affected by excessive heat warnings and heat advisories, from the border of Mexico and southwest Texas and eastward towards the border of southern Louisiana, and Mississippi. 

In addition to the heat, overnight tropical humidity will trap in heat and prevent the nighttime low temperatures from dipping below 80 degrees in some places. The heat is expected to continue through the rest of this week, according to the National Weather Service. 

All of this heat and humidity have fueled some June tornadoes. At least 17 tornadoes were reported over the weekend across Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Oregon, and Colorado. One person was killed and 18 others injured from the severe storms, including a reported tornado, in Jasper County, Mississippi. 

“I’ve seen more tornadoes than I can count. I’ve never seen the level of decimation to a town, as I’ve seen today,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott said at a news conference on Saturday, June 17 according to The Washington Post. 

[Related: World set to ‘temporarily’ breach major climate threshold in next five years.]

Deadly heat wave in northern India 

In India, roughly 170 people have died amid a sweltering heat wave affecting two of the country’s most populated states. Routine power outages and overwhelmed hospitals compound the already dangerous situation. 

Heat-related illnesses have killed at least 119 people in In the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. In neighboring Bihar, at least 47 people have died.

“So many people are dying from the heat that we are not getting a minute’s time to rest. On Sunday, I carried 26 dead bodies,” Jitendra Kumar Yadav, a hearse driver in Deoria town, 110 68 miles from Ballia, Uttar Pradesh, told The Associated Press.

These regions of the country are known for extreme heat during the summer, but temperatures have been consistently above normal. According to the Indian Meteorological Department, high temperatures in recent days have consistently reached 110 degrees Fahrenheit. 

A dire report from the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization (WMO) released late in 2022, found that the past eight years were the hottest on record. Since 1993, the rate of sea level rise has doubled, with the past two and a half years alone accounting for 10 percent of the overall rise in sea level since satellite measurements began about three decades ago. 

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WHEN VALER CLARK and Josiah Austin moved to El Coronado cattle ranch in southern Arizona in the 1980s, the seasonal rain didn’t soak into the soil but roared through arroyos and washes, cutting them deeper into the earth. The erosion was threatening a road, so they placed a few rocks across the adjacent wash. The tiny structure worked as intended, slowing water, catching soil, and fostering the return of long-gone plants. Clark and Austin had instinctually re-created an Indigenous technique for managing water in drylands. 

Ultimately, the duo added around 20,000 small rock barriers across tributaries of the often-dry Turkey Creek, which ran through their 1,800-acre property in the Chiricahua Mountains. Within a few monsoon seasons, water seeped from the structures year-round, and the creek corridor turned green with plants. Downstream landowners were suspicious, claiming that Clark and Austin were holding on to “their” water. But when Laura Norman, a physical scientist from the US Geological Survey, measured the flow in 2013, she found that the barriers weren’t just slowing flash floods and extending supply into the dry season: They’d actually raised the stream’s flow by 28 percent. 

Today, the Southwest is staggering through a “megadrought”—possibly the worst in 1,200 years. The Colorado River, which quenches the demands of more than 40 million people in seven US states and Mexico, is seeing average flows that are 19 percent lower than in the last century. Climate change is making the region’s water woes more severe, scientists say. But drought is partly determined by the gap between supply and human demand, and right now, demand is greater than the region’s supply. What’s more, our development choices—urban sprawl, industrial forestry and agriculture, intensive cattle grazing, and the concrete infrastructure we use to try to control water—are sapping the river’s natural systems and resilience. 

Modern development tends to erase places where water slows down: wetlands, flood plains, mountain meadows, and forests. These ecosystems absorb high flows, prevent floods, and move water underground, which raises the water table. A healthy groundwater system supplies streams, wetlands, and rivers during the dry season and hydrates soil and plants, making them less likely to burn in wildfires and allowing them to release water into the atmosphere, contributing to rain. But humans have dramatically altered the water cycle by draining or filling as much as 87 percent of global wetlands over the past three centuries, interrupting the flow of two-thirds of rivers, and doubling the land area of paved cities since 1992. All told, we have transformed 75 percent of the world’s total land area for housing, agriculture, and industry.

Clark and Austin’s approach to land management has shown one way to reverse these negative trends, and the strategy is now spreading across the Southwest and northern Mexico. Their streambed structures, coupled with Norman’s in-depth studies on the benefits, led to the USGS co-founding the Sky Island Restoration Collaborative, a group of government agencies, nonprofits, private landowners, scientists, and restorationists in the US and Mexico who are building thousands of slow-water structures.

Called natural infrastructure in dryland streams, or NIDS, these structures include beaver dams, human versions of beaver dams, one-rock dams, check dams, log dams, leaky weirs, earthen berms, and gabions. The appropriate intervention depends on the specific site’s width and slope, nearby natural materials, and other factors. Despite the fact that several have “dam” in the name, these features do not block downstream flows like concrete hydropower dams; they just slow it down. They’re intentionally leaky to detain water, not retain it. “They’re a totally different beast,” says Norman.

She and her colleagues have documented NIDS’ effectiveness in storing carbon dioxide and mitigating flooding, water scarcity, pollution, heat, erosion, dust, wildlife loss, and food insecurity. These interventions—combined with levee setbacks to reconnect rivers with flood plains, forest and grassland restoration, and support for beavers’ comeback after they were hunted nearly to extinction—are part of the global “slow water movement” that could help boost water availability throughout the Colorado River basin.

At the rim of the Grand Canyon, the all-powerful nature of water is explicit: The reflective squiggle a mile below carved the natural cathedral out of rock over millions of years. Yet Euro-American culture has interpreted that force as a challenge and tried to control it. Viewed solely in terms of human need, water is either considered a threat or a commodity—the new billion-dollar Colorado River deal involving the US government and three Western states is just one example. But that’s not the only way people relate to water. Other cultures, including many Indigenous groups in North America, perceive it as a friend or relative. With that perspective, the right to water comes with the responsibility to care for it, along with the many elements and organisms—soils, rocks, microbes, insects, and more—that also have relationships with it. 

Choosing to return land to water might seem wasteful to some. But by restoring drylands to wetlands, or ciénegas in Spanish, Clark and Austin have shown how healthy slow-water systems can repair delicate desert landscapes that humans have destroyed.  

A sick land

In early March, the morning after a fierce windstorm made saguaros sway and dropped snow on the low desert, I drove south from Tucson with Norman through the tiny hamlets of Elgin and Sonoita. We left behind the saguaros and paloverde trees of the Sonoran Desert and entered the Chihuahuan Desert, studded with big tuffets of sacaton grass and grazing pronghorns. At the roughly 28,000-acre Babacomari Ranch, we walked a channel of the San Pedro watershed. Norman, clad in a black cowboy hat, hiking boots, and a thick Wrangler work jacket, was meeting up with a fellow researcher to take soil samples. The channel has several gabions and log structures, installed eight years ago by Borderlands Restoration, a nonprofit that belongs to the Sky Island Restoration Collaborative. 

Gabions are chicken wire containers filled with rocks. More engineered than other NIDS interventions, but still low profile, they are typically used in valley bottoms and anchored deep into the sides of the stream banks. The pieces of wood in the log structures are spaced 6 to 12 inches apart, pushed vertically into the streambed. They are meant to help water move underground and create “messiness” in the stream that slows water, captures sediment, and creates habitat. Both features have acted as intended: Parts of them are barely visible because trapped sediment has raised the riverbed and allowed new plants, including sacaton grass, to take root.

Borderlands Restoration founder Ron Pulliam served in the Clinton administration’s Department of the Interior and taught ecology at the University of Georgia. He says major results from NIDS, such as streams flowing year-round, can take 10 to 20 years—but small improvements in erosion and vegetation can happen in just a year of two. Seeing those quick results three decades ago encouraged Clark and Austin to stick with their unconventional efforts at Turkey Creek and beyond. 

While the couple divorced several years back and sold El Coronado, Clark owns several other properties on both sides of the border. In consultation with ranchers and conservationists, she founded a nonprofit called Cuenca Los Ojos that builds NIDS and teaches these practices to other landowners and community members. Cuenca is also part of the Sky Islands group, and Clark’s daughter, Valerie Gordon, sits on the board.

This hard, dirty work is a long way from Clark’s early life in New York City. Then, in her 40s, she and Austin moved to El Coronado. The landscape “was so novel and so beautiful, it became the focus of my life,” she says. Curiosity about fire, water, plants, and lichen consumed her. “I’d never looked at ants before. I thought, There’s so much life going on here that I know nothing about.” 

That attention has served her well. “Valer has amazing powers of observation,” says Pulliam, a longtime friend and slow water ally. “She has a genius for understanding the movement of water and wildlife. She can’t explain it technically. But she has this intuitive feeling for how things work.” 

Now 83, Clark recalls her first summer at El Coronado in the 1980s. “The monsoon season hit and I was terrified, because I saw how much damage the flooding was doing in the hills. It was a lot of erosion. The vegetation was being flattened. I remember asking, ‘What do the cows eat? Rocks?’” She felt something was wrong and began studying the history of the area. She discovered that local trees were cut down in the 1800s to fuel copper production. Without them, grass boomed, so settlers brought in vast herds of cattle and sheep, who made short work of the vegetation. Mining and cotton production took a toll as well. Then when rain struck the denuded land, the water cut deep channels into the earth. 

What water wants

By placing rocks across a stream channel to slow water, Clark and Austin had intuitively re-created a technique that Indigenous peoples in the Southwest and northern Mexico had deployed for centuries to slow water, buffer against drought, and reverse desertification. 

Soon after the couple added those first structures, a group of men came to El Coronado from Mexico, looking for work. Clark showed them the little rock dam. “I said, ‘It’s wetter here, and grasses are coming in. What if we do that in the hills because they’re quite bare?’ And they said, ‘We do that at home.’” For generations, they had used a similar practice to grow corn. 

The men returned seasonally for 20 years and created some 20,000 rock structures throughout Turkey Creek’s side channels in the hills. As the low barriers caught sediment and deep-rooted grasses returned, “the mountains became sponges,” Clark recalls. “The wash became a stream, and scientists came and put fish in the stream.”

Gordon says the tenacity required to see this vision through is part of Clark’s personality. “My mother is very comfortable taking an unconventional path. She is not afraid of a challenge. And I think she also likes to do what other people don’t want to do.” 

Indigenous rock structures similar to those at El Coronado can be found throughout the Southwest. Over the last decade, Pulliam saw several on land purchased by Borderlands Restoration in Arizona, and was struck by how different the watersheds looked from others in the region that were severely washed out. “All of the little side draws in this area have almost no erosion,” he says. “If you look carefully, there are ancient rock structures at least 1,200 years old still working.”

Indigenous peoples are still creating and using slow-water structures for various purposes today. Michael Kotutwa Johnson is a member of the Hopi Tribe and has a Ph.D. in natural resources. But his most important credential, according to his University of Arizona profile, is that “he continues to practice Hopi dry farming, a practice of his people for millennia.”

The Hopi, like most Indigenous cultures, are “place-based societies,” says Johnson. Their place receives just 6 to 10 inches of precipitation a year, so they have developed methods designed to conserve soil moisture. Johnson explains some of them.

Hopi read the landscape and natural water flows, then build rock dams at the bases of mesas to divert runoff into fields. They also use rock detention structures to capture nutrient-bearing sediment to hold moisture, allowing farmers to plant different varieties of crops without fertilizers or irrigation. “Crops always need new soil with nutrients,” Johnson says. Contour farming—planting across the slope of the land at a certain angle—also slows water and wind. Another strategy includes leaving the stalks, cobs, and leaves on the ground after a corn harvest to catch snow, allowing it to melt and be absorbed into the soil. 

But there’s more to the Hopis’ resilience than a series of slow-water techniques, Johnson says. “It’s about having a relationship with the environment in a place that you’ve been living for a long, long time” and about the associated cultural belief system.

Rather than trying to maximize production, Hopi growers read the landscape to see what is possible for nature to provide that year. The timing and quantity of springtime vegetation serve as “biological indicators,” Johnson says. He notes that Hopi women select plants for certain traits and keep many varieties of seed for different annual conditions. “We’ve had 200-year droughts in our history. Our place is a testament to our resilience.”

Because traditional ecological knowledge doesn’t conform to Western science’s norms, the latter has been slow to recognize it as legitimate. Johnson counters, “When you have 3,000 years of replication, that is a science.” 

Making a convincing argument

Norman, whose expertise lies in forestry, watershed management, and remote sensing, agrees strongly with Johnson’s sentiment. But she realized that nature-inspired structures, whether built by Indigenous peoples or permaculture-minded land owners such as Clark and Austin, would not be recognized as a legitimate strategy by some unless their benefits were measured according to the Western scientific method. “My science is meant to address these misconceptions about the structures,” Norman says.

She has now dedicated a decade to leading the USGS Aridland Water Harvesting Study. Her work, with geomorphologists, biologists, botanists, and hydrologists, has proven that small stones and other natural materials placed across streams can restore and create permanent wetlands, regrow plants, store carbon dioxide, reconnect streams with flood plains, recharge groundwater, and increase stream flow. 

Norman grew up in Rhode Island, then moved west to Oregon for college and on to Arizona for graduate school. She first encountered rock detention structures when researching her Ph.D. dissertation, which used satellite data and flood modeling to make sense of environmental justice impacts from poor land management in Nogales, Mexico, and its twin city in Arizona. Erosion was releasing fine particle dust into the air, resulting in human health problems; flooding was endangering people; and heavy sediment loads were causing sewers to overflow. While working with the International Boundary and Water Commission to identify locations where structures could help address these problems, she became fascinated by the way small changes to the terrain could alter water flow and ultimately the shape and character of the land. 

Not long after, Norman heard rumors of an oasis in the Chiricahuas. Intrigued, she visited El Coronado Ranch after a rain. The rock structures detained huge pools of water, keeping the washes running. “Seeing that with my own eyes was mind-blowing,” she says.

To measure the effects, she compared a tributary of Turkey Creek with neighboring Rock Creek, which had no rock structures. Using modified stream gauges and precipitation measurements, she found that the subtle barriers reduced peak flows from summer monsoons by half and extended base flows into fall by three to four weeks. The check dams kept more water in the system, resulting in that incredible 28 percent increase of water flowing downstream. What’s more, they captured 200 tons of soil per year, cleaning the water of sediment and supporting verdant vegetation that attracted animals. 

Norman explains why there was more water in the treated stream. In contrast to Turkey Creek’s series of wetland sponges, Rock Creek has bare bedrock. “When water runs over an impervious surface and is exposed to elements, it evaporates,” Norman says. Compacted and dry soils also repel water, or become hydrophobic—“scared of water.” But when barriers make the life-giving liquid linger, it can permeate the soil.

“A lot of practitioners and ranchers were of the opinion that they were able to create more water [with rock detention structures],” says Norman. “But to be able to document that was amazing. More water storage and more water availability for everything, to reverse that degradation cycle into a restoration cycle.”

Pulliam, who has collaborated with Norman on some of her papers, says her scientific rigor has led to wider acceptance of these practices. “Early on, even at USGS, people were skeptical. But as evidence accumulated, they began to see Laura as a really innovative scientist,” he says. “Like Valer, she persisted through a period where no one had much faith in [the structures’] efficacy.”  

In 2021, the American Water Resources Association awarded Norman a medal of excellence, saying her “research is the foundation of a burgeoning community of practice and a shift in policy implementation in the arid Southwest.”

Desert oases

Studies from atmospheric scientists have found that, in the Colorado River basin, the warmer climate is creating a thirstier atmosphere, which could evaporate more water out of the soil and plants and sometimes turn snow directly to water vapor. They predict that Colorado River flows could be 20 to 30 percent lower by 2050, meaning state negotiators of the river’s sharing agreement should be planning for even less water than they have today.

But Norman and other experts studying water cycle restoration assert that it’s not just climate change making the West drier. People have also dried out the land over the last two centuries by killing beavers, cutting forests, overgrazing grasslands, and cutting off rivers from their flood plains and wetlands with levees, channels, and diversions. What if slow water interventions, including Natural Infrastructure in Dryland Streams, were deployed widely across the West? Could they heal the land-water relationship and reverse desertification?

“Yes,” Norman says, without hesitation.

In a paper published last fall, Norman and co-authors reviewed many studies that support the claim of region-wide restoration being able to counteract desertification. One reason is that NIDS create localized humidity and cooling. In a park in Phoenix, Norman found the air is up to 3 degrees Celsius cooler around structures for two days after a rainfall. 

Another reason is that about 40 percent of rain over land, on average, is formed from evaporation from soil and transpiration from plants. With forests cut, grasslands overgrazed, soil compacted, and more wetlands and flood plains paved over, that moisture is missing from the Colorado River’s water cycle. 

To undo part of the damage, slow-water projects need to be distributed throughout water basins, not centralized. The interventions are typically small, but their impact on flood protection, water storage, and localized cooling is cumulative, much as how solar panels on many roofs can generate a lot of electricity. “The whole Colorado River basin, plugged full of structures?” says Norman. “At that scale, you’d see a regional response that might impact the climate by sequestration of carbon and by cooling of temperatures from bringing moisture back into the atmosphere.”

These changes also support wildlife, providing critical refuges for animals native to the Sky Islands, one of the most biodiverse regions in North America. Supporting an array of animals—Gila monsters, black bears, mountain lions, ocelots, bobcats, coatis, javelinas, foxes, deer—is part of Cuenca Los Ojos’ mission and what drives Clark to heal land and water. “The horny toad [or horned lizard] squirts blood out of its eyes to scare you. There are just so many delightful creatures in the region.” The fact that she thinks blood-squirting eyes are delightful epitomizes her enthusiasm for everything she encounters on the land.

Scientists, including Pulliam, have been documenting the return of wildlife. They even recorded an endangered jaguar near the rock structures at Cienega Ranch, a site in the Aridland Water Harvesting Study.  “Because there’s water, the animals come,’’ says Norman.

One critter they’re tracking is famous for building its own infrastructure in water. Beavers have returned to southern Arizona after trappers wiped them out 150 years ago. They’ve also been found on Clark’s ranches in northern Mexico. “Beavers won’t settle in desiccated areas,” Pulliam says, “but if you provide seed areas where they can get established, they can gradually improve adjacent areas.”

The upwelling of a movement

Nature-based solutions are gaining ground worldwide, including in the US—incentivized by the Biden administration’s Infrastructure and Inflation Reduction acts. But they are still often dismissed as insignificant in the challenge of buffering human communities from flood, drought, and climate change. That attitude reveals a misunderstanding of the scale of human disruption to the water cycle, and therefore, the scale needed for projects like NIDS to repair that damage.

Because the federal government influences the way so much land and water in the American West is managed, it could make a monumental difference by embracing slow-water practices, says Clark. But while some federal employees support them, so far, it’s not part of the official policy at the Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, or Bureau of Land Management. 

Still, the federal agencies are coming around, says Pulliam. One lightbulb moment came after wildfires roared through the Chiricahuas about a decade ago. “Watersheds with rock structures had much, much less damage, and the Forest Service started noticing,” Pulliam explains, adding that the department is now giving contracts to Cuenca Los Ojos and Borderlands Restoration to build structures on its land. Overall, however, he says the US government retains a bias for modern engineering in its funding. State agencies, on the other hand, are much more open to NIDS. “They all buy in. They see it. It’s in their backyard.” 

Local Indigenous communities have shown what close attention to nature’s ways can yield. “Water is really life to us,” says Johnson, the Hopi farmer, contrasting that attitude with the dominant society’s view that water is a commodity. “People are so far removed from the relationship that we have with water that they just don’t understand the complexities, and they keep making the same mistakes over and over again.” 

Maybe we can improve our relationship with water, as individuals like Johnson, Clark, and Austin demonstrate how to heal water systems, and scientists like Norman and Pulliam document the intricacies of how they work. In response to water scarcity in the Southwest, many people think the answer is to bring in more from elsewhere via dams, aqueducts, and desalination plants. But slow-water practitioners make the most of the water that’s already there. Norman recalls a local saying, half-jokingly, “Ah, that would be great if there were some magic water that just appeared!” When she started studying ecosystems benefiting from slow-water techniques, “I was like, I think we found some, you know?”

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It has been a chaotic start to the Northern Hemisphere’s “danger season,” those few months of the year that are accompanied by a parade of disasters. This year’s danger season already includes abnormally high sea-surface temperatures in the world’s oceans, catastrophic wildfires in Canada, and unusual flooding in California.

Experts say recent extremes are being influenced by a hodgepodge of distinct factors. Climate change is involved, but natural variations in global weather, and an unfortunate dose of serendipity, are also at play. 

“Global warming itself hasn’t suddenly accelerated this year,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in a live briefing on Monday. “Part of what’s going on is random bad luck.” 

Last week, the U.S. National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration announced that El Niño conditions — above average sea-surface temperatures that spur higher-than-usual warmth in many parts of the world — were officially present in the Pacific Ocean. The swing from La Niña, El Niño’s opposite extreme, to an El Niño means a much warmer year is in store for the entire globe. But the cycle, which is associated with extremes such as drought and severe storms, also has localized impacts. In eastern and southern Africa, the Horn of Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and parts of the Asia-Pacific region, El Niño can spur famine, outbreaks of infectious disease, and heat stress. The natural weather phenomenon may also be having an impact, Swain said, on record-breaking land surface temperatures in Canada that have helped to fuel its devastating fire season so far. 

At the same time, scientists have been keeping tabs on a separate phenomenon unfolding in the Atlantic Ocean. Temperatures in the Atlantic hurricane region have been anomalously high for three months now. They are currently 82 degrees Fahrenheit on average — 35 percent higher than a prior record set in 2005. 

“There has never been any day in observed history where the entire North Atlantic has been nearly as warm as it is right now,” Swain said. The rest of the Atlantic Basin — the Gulf of Mexico and the Eastern Seaboard — is also warmer than average, which means an active Atlantic hurricane season may be on tap. Generally, El Niño suppresses hurricane activity in the Atlantic and leads to a more severe typhoon season in the Pacific, but above-average Atlantic Ocean temperatures may negate El Niño’s dampening effects and fuel big Atlantic hurricanes this year. 

A third factor, a volcanic eruption that occurred at the beginning of 2022 in the southern Pacific Ocean, is also contributing to above-average global temperatures. Volcanic eruptions typically have a temporary cooling effect on the planet because they shoot soot and other sun-blocking particles into the air. But the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai eruption in the Tongan archipelago wasn’t a typical volcanic eruption. “This was a sub-oceanic, huge, massively explosive eruption that essentially vaporized huge quantities of sea water,” Swain said. The volcano’s plume was so intense that it shot vaporized water into the stratosphere, where the vapor has been having a warming effect on the planet. 

All of this means we’re in for a period of accelerated warming due to the convergence of these factors. The good news is that the warming effect that El Niño and the Hunga Tonga eruption are having on the planet is temporary. El Niño lasts between nine and 12 months and the vaporized water in the stratosphere will fade in a few years. 

The bad news is that climate change, which experts say contributed to the formation of this year’s El Niño and may be behind the record-breaking ocean temperatures in the North Atlantic, is still churning in the background. It isn’t going away anytime soon.

“The long-term trend is not going to stop,” Swain said. “We are stair-stepping up on our way to much warmer oceans and a much warmer climate.”

This article originally appeared in Grist. 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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Researchers at Arizona State University are employing a breathing, perspiring, humanoid robot to study extreme temperatures’ effects on the body—including, yes, butt sweat. But as uncanny as ANDI (and its rear end) may look, the device could help experts better devise products, methods, and treatments to keep populations safe as the planet continues its dangerous, climate change-induced warming patterns.

Aside from such visible, sometimes socially awkward physical signs of heat stress, there’s actually a lot that experts still don’t know about humans’ biological reactions to high temperatures. But researchers like Jenni Vanos, an associate professor in ASU’s School of Sustainability, can’t simply plop test subjects into dangerously extreme heat scenarios and observe the dire effects. “There are situations we know of… where people are dying of heat and we still don’t fully understand what happened,” Vanos said in a recent statement. “ANDI can help us figure that out.”

[Related: 1 in 5 people are likely to live in dangerously hot climates by 2100.]

Funded by a National Science Foundation Major Research Instrumentation Grant and custom-built by Thermetrics, ASU’s ANDI is one of only two currently deployed at a research institution. It’s also the first thermal manikin capable of being used outdoors, thanks to a novel internal cooling channels. Within this unique system, cool water circulates throughout ANDI’s “body” to keep its overall temperature low enough to endure extreme heat, while sensors measure numerous variables influencing human perceptions of heat, such as sun brightness and air convection.

These perceptions are as varied as humans’ health and body types are—something ANDI can easily accommodate. “We can [enter] different BMI models, different age characteristics and different medical conditions,” said Ankit Joshi, an ASU research scientist and lead operator of ANDI. Joshi offers a diabetes patient, who has different thermal regulation abilities as a healthy person, as an example. “We can account for all this modification with our customized models.”

ASU’s ANDI generally resides in the aptly-named “Warm Room,” a chamber built to simulate heat-exposure scenarios seen in regions around the world, which includes factors such as wind, solar radiation, and temperatures as high as 140-degrees Fahrenheit. Within the Warm Room, ANDI can accurately measure human sweating mechanics such as changing core and skin temperatures.

Outside the Warm Room, however, ANDI is reportedly getting a walking buddy. Over the summer, the research team will pair the manikin with the non-humanoid MaRTy, ASU’s biometeorological heat robot. Both machines will stroll through ASU’s (very hot) campus, with MaRTy measuring the heat that hits a body, while ANDI can record how a body reacts to said temperatures.

[Related: Heat is the silent killer we should all be worried about.]

There is no single solution to adapting to rising temperatures, and researchers are well aware of this. “We’re trying to approach this from a very holistic point, but there’s not going to be a silver bullet for anything,” said Konrad Rykaczewski, an associate professor in ASU’s School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy and the study’s principal investigator. Such varying options include designing better cooling clothing, or even exoskeleton backpacks made specifically to help cool down its wearers.

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The dangerous smoke from more than 100 wildfires burning in Quebec, Canada is drifting south into the United States. The smog can cause burning eyes and headaches, making it dangerous to go outside, particularly for those with asthma and heart diseases. 

[Related: Here’s exactly how wildfires are polluting our air.]

New York City had the worst air quality of any major metropolitan area late last night on Tuesday June 6, according to IQAIR. The city has since dropped to second place in terms of air pollution in the world following New Delhi, India.

Early on Wednesday June 7, New York City’s air quality was considered “very unhealthy,” according to the US Air Quality Index. This metric is maintained by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and New York City’s AQI was 226 out of a maximum of over 300. The EPA characterizes this level as Code Purple, which means elevated health risk for all groups. 

In a health advisory, NYC officials urged at-risk residents to wear high-quality masks outdoors and try to stay indoors. 

“If you are an older adult or have heart or breathing problems and need to be outside, wear a high-quality mask (e.g. N95 or KN95),” the office of Mayor Eric Adams said in a statement.

“Currently, we are taking precautions out of an abundance of caution to protect New Yorkers’ health until we are able to get a better sense of future air quality reports,” Adams said.

Nearly 100 million people across numerous states are affected by the dangerous conditions, with sunrises turning red under gray skies. The smoke is expected to continue with air quality alerts issued for New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont,  New Hampshire and as far south as Washington DC and North Carolina.

This fire season is shaping up to be among the worst in Canadian history, and the province of Quebec is seeking international support to help fight the fires. With 480 wilderness firefighters on the ground, Quebec can fight around 30 fires, Quebec Premier François Legault told the Associated Press on June 5. Usually, he said, firefighters would come from other provinces to help.

“When I talk to the premiers of other provinces, they have their hands full,” Legault said in a press briefing in Quebec City.

Wildfire smoke has very tiny particulate matter, or PM2.5. This is an extremely small pollutant, but is the most dangerous. It can travel deep into lung tissue and enter the bloodstream. In addition to wildfires, tiny particulate matter comes from sources like dust storms and the combustion of fossil fuels. Studies have linked it to numerous health problems including heart diseases, asthma, and other respiratory illnesses.

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that around 4.2 million premature deaths were associated with fine particulate matter in 2016.  The concentration of PM2.5 in NYC was over 10 times the guideline set by the WHO.

[Related: Less ice in the Arctic could mean more wildfires in the US.]

“If you can see or smell smoke, know that you’re being exposed,” William Barrett, the national senior director of clean air advocacy with the American Lung Association told CNN. “And it’s important that you do everything you can to remain indoors during those high, high pollution episodes, and it’s really important to keep an eye on your health or any development of symptoms.”

To live with wildfire smoke, experts suggest learning how to check and monitor air quality early and often, in addition to closing windows, using air filtration if possible, and keeping pets indoors. It is also feasible to build your own air purifier for as low as $30.

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Excerpt from The Boy Who Reached for the Stars: A Memoir by Elio Morillo. Published by HarperOne. Copyright © 2022 HarperCollins.

On September 20, 2017, Category 5 Hurricane María hit my beloved Puerto Rico, hovering over the island for the next 48 hours, uprooting trees, causing power and phone outages, and inflicting catastrophic devastation throughout the land. It was a terrifying stretch of time when those of us with loved ones in the path of this

destruction could only hope and pray they were okay. As we waited to get any type of news, my fix-it mentality kicked in—I needed to do something to channel my helplessness into action. I joined forces with a Puerto Rican who worked in another team at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory to begin collecting donations, so we would be ready to ship them out as soon as it was possible. Relief washed over us both when the worry laden silence was finally broken and we heard from our respective families and friends. More than anything, they had suffered material damage to their homes and surrounding streets, but everyone within our circles was okay otherwise. Rosa and Sonia described the experience as a powered-on jet engine sucking everything up into the air.

As more news was released of the extent of the damage people had suffered, my friend and I continued to organize donation efforts in Los Angeles. It was all we could do at the time. I had to carry my worry while I continued to work. I was assigned to avionics and thermal functions testing. In simple terms, the rover has two brains: its main day-to-day brain and what I call its lizard brain. The lizard brain is always running in the background, ready for fight or flight. It checks to make sure that the main computer, or main brain, is working well. If something goes south with the main brain, then the lizard brain can go through particular states to keep the system at a basic level of safety, putting the rover in a partially autonomous configuration that allows us time to figure out what to input to safely reconfigure its hardware.

The rover’s thermal behaviors are what helps keep it alive overnight, when Mars temperatures can drop to −100°F or lower, depending on the season. There are particular instruments and mechanisms that can only operate within a specific range of temperatures.

If they become too cold, we must be able to heat them up. If they’re too warm, we have to stop using them or actively cool them down to the range we want them to operate in. As we gradually entered an all-hands-on-deck phase ahead of our July 2020 launch date, I knew that if I was going to be an effective and successful member of the team, I needed to make the conscious decision to put my work first, but not before making my all-important pit stop to spend Christmas with my family.

This time we met up in Florida. My grandparents, who didn’t travel often, joined us from New York. And I got to reunite with Sonia and Robert, who were temporarily living in the area while they sorted through Hurricane María’s damage back home. While my abuelo made sure the TV and music were set up and ready for our gathering, my abuela got busy in the kitchen, whipping up her famous casuela or caldo de bola together with extra sides to keep us all fed, full, and happy. My tías and tíos would give them a hand while making fun of each other and roasting my cousins. And a round of Telefunken (a game similar to rummy) was always in order, with bets of up to two dollars per person per round.

The highlight of this break wasn’t just spending quality time with my relatives and chosen family; it was also getting the chance to take my 91-year-old grandfather and my brother to the Kennedy Space Center—a first for the three of us. Walking into the center and suddenly being in the presence of all this antiquated hardware took my breath away. The exhibit featuring the Saturn V launch vehicle made me feel so small. I was mesmerized by how the 1950s team was able to design the stunning hardware displayed before me with the limited technology they had access to in comparison to what we have now. Sure, they had a relatively bigger budget and thousands of people working on one problem, which is not a luxury we enjoy, but they didn’t have our software and automated procedures, and they were doing it all for the first time. As if taking all of this in wasn’t enough, being there as a NASA engineer, walking the entire center by my grandfather’s side, with me as our tour guide, explaining each piece before us, was an unparalleled full-circle moment for me. I stopped several times, glanced at my grandfather, and quietly asked, “Abuelo, are you okay? Would you like us to sit down for a little while to rest?” but he outright refused any break, likely pushed forward by a sense of pride for his walking abilities as well as the sense of wonder that had taken hold of us all as we witnessed this history-making equipment. It was an unequivocal reminder of the legacy I was now helping build with the Mars 2020 mission.

Inspired by the history I had witnessed at the Kennedy Center, and with a renewed sense of purpose, I was more eager than ever to dive even deeper into the mission at stake. February 2018 found me interacting with the Ingenuity helicopter for the first time, more specifically its base station, a component of the helicopter system that would live on the rover. This is the piece of hardware that would communicate with the helicopter on Mars. We were developing the capabilities, the hardware, all of it, to fulfill a technology demonstration to test the first powered flight on Mars, but NASA HQ still hadn’t given the okay to add it to the Mars 2020 mission. So we were operating with the hope this green light would eventually be given, and we kept plowing ahead on the rover side, considering how we’d carry the helicopter, how we’d communicate with it, how we’d operate it from this base station. Initially, many of the people on the integration side of the rover were against the idea of integrating the helicopter as a separate system, because that meant it would also have its own separate battery. What if its battery caught fire while cruising through space or on the Mars surface? How would that damage the rover itself? “There’s no way the helicopter will work” was one line of thought. The other: “There’s no way you’ll be able to get all of this work done in time.” And the third: “This helicopter will be a distraction from the rest of the science the rover has to accomplish.” Was it a risk to do this tremendous amount of work for a helicopter that might never launch? Yes, but it was one some of us were willing to take.

As the summer neared, I set my mind on Puerto Rico and the risks and sacrifices they had been forced to take when Hurricane María hit their shores. The island had far from recovered from the damage sustained a little less than a year earlier, and my colleague (turned girlfriend) and I were still eager to help in any way we could. I decided to use my social media to reach out to teachers in Puerto Rico to see how we could help that summer. I quickly received a reply from a University of Michigan friend whose mom had a colleague, Marisa, in need of some help. With the community’s blessing, she and her husband had decided to take over an abandoned school in Los Naranjos, a neighborhood in Vega Baja, located near Dorado, and turn it into a community center. The local residents had lost so much during the hurricane that she was hell-bent on making a difference. Now they were looking for volunteer to get the center off the ground. My girlfriend and I created a three-day STEM program for kids between the ages of eight and 15, called Ingenieros del Futuro (Engineers of the Future). The activities we planned introduced the kids to basic engineering concepts and revolved around three themes: robotics, electricity, and rockets. I set up a GoFundMe to help pay for some of the materials, while we paid for everything else out of pocket.

When we arrived, seeing the devastation firsthand threw me off my orbit and momentarily pushed me into an impotent void. As I painstakingly drove through intersections where the traffic lights had gone dark due to the lack of power, I slowly took in the trees scattered around the area like giant twigs, displaced rooftops, cut-down electricity cables, and attempted to store this harrowing data in a corner of my mind so I could find my way back to our main focus: the kids. I’d give myself time to process this emotional oscillation later, when I returned home.

We immediately got the kids working and building several projects—a basic robot, an electric car that used a solar panel to power it, a satellite model, and a wind turbine—to illustrate robotics, sustainable energy, and space exploration. We also scheduled outdoor time to give their brains a break and burn some energy playing soccer with us. For the last project of their three-day journey, I taught them how to build a rocket with a two-liter plastic bottle and a few other readily available components. I had also purchased a bottle launch system that pumped up the rockets and had a trigger that allowed each kid to send their own rocket into the air.

Once it reached a certain height, a parachute they had built into their system with their own hands deployed, safely landing their creation. Their excitement during each launch, descent, and landing, about further engaging with technology and pursuing opportunities in STEM, gave me hope for the people of Puerto Rico. The island currently has to import most of its food, despite once being fully reliant on its own agriculture sector. With agritech becoming more accessible, combined with the development of hydroponics, vertical farming, and more, I see this as a potentially booming sector for Puerto Rico in the future. But they will need dedicated STEM workers to make it happen. The same goes for the ever-controversial power grid. As energy storage and solar, hydro, and wind power become more accessible, microgrids will thrive, and so will the jobs related to those renewable systems.

Sinergia Los Naranjos is still active in the community. Marisa successfully launched a kitchen for folks to run catering businesses, and her husband, Ricardo, runs a reef restoration effort where many of the kids participate and get scuba training. Workshops occur in partnership with local student groups from nearby universities, mostly through grassroots funding and efforts. These kids have the power to build a better future, and I hope to continue to be able to come alongside them and encourage these developments through outreach, philanthropy, and policy influence.

By the spring of 2019, I was working with a few team members to test the capability of our rover to charge the helicopter battery through its base station while traversing space. Batteries, including those in computers and cell phones, left uncharged for a long period of time lose their properties and can’t regain their full charging potential.

Similarly, overcharging a battery and leaving it stored for a long period of time will degrade its lifetime. We had to figure out the sweet spot for the helicopter battery, then find how to measure that charge and, based on that, how to charge it from the rover battery.

Once we figured this out through tests and failures and finally verified what worked, we had to come up with the sequence of steps that needed to be taken to charge the helicopter while flying through space. It was a complicated set of tests that took up a lot of our time but was essential to the helicopter’s functionality and safety.

That summer I began to write and execute integration procedures for the helicopter deployment system, which is the assembly at the bottom of the rover that would hold the helicopter and deploy it. The system consisted of a tiny robotic arm with a motor that would keep the helicopter upright so that it could be successfully dropped onto the Martian surface. After testing this capability and gathering the necessary parameters, we determined that we could indeed deploy it on Mars. A short while after this, JPL finally approved the addition of the helicopter to the Mars 2020 mission. We got the green light. Like most times in my life, the risk proved to be worth taking.

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Atlantic hurricane season officially begins on June 1—and a disturbance in the Gulf of Mexico is already brewing. On June 2, tropical wave Invest 91-L officially became the first named system of the 2023 Atlantic hurricane season: Tropical Storm Arlene. It will bring downpours and gusty thunderstorms to parts of Florida.

[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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This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here. 

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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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. The National Weather Service has officially detected signs 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. 

Back in May, David DeWitt, director of the Climate Prediction Center at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, forecast an 82 percent chance of El Niño arriving before 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 into 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?”

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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.”

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In Overmatched, we take a close look at the science and technology at the heart of the defense industry—the world of soldiers and spies.

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.

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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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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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This article was originally featured on High Country News.

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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This article was originally featured on Task and Purpose.

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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This article was originally featured on High Country News.

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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This article was originally featured on High Country News.

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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