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29 June 2020
Rain falls, as it always has
“Chances are good that the drop of rain that splashes on your forehead is made of molecules that were here long before the first humans looked up in wonder at a cloudy sky, long before the first leafy plants stretched their roots into the soil, long before the first single-celled organisms took the critical step of dividing in half to reproduce.”
29 August 2019
Atmospheric rivers sometimes soak Alaska
Scientists have long noted these flood-causing/wildfire-relieving “long, narrow plumes of enhanced atmospheric water vapor.” If you were to study weather maps of the entire Earth today, you would see about 11 atmospheric rivers.
24 June 2019
Atmospheric rivers getting warmer along U.S. West Coast
Most of the West Coast of the United States relies on a healthy winter snowpack to provide water through the dry summer months. But when precipitation falls as rain rather than snow, it can diminish summer water supplies, as well as trigger floods and landslides. A new study in AGU’s Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres finds atmospheric rivers –plumes of moisture that deliver much of the west’s precipitation—have gotten warmer over the past 36 years.
24 July 2017
Could “cocktail geoengineering” save the climate?
Geoengineering is a catch-all term that refers to various theoretical ideas for altering Earth’s energy balance to combat climate change. New research from an international team of atmospheric scientists published by Geophysical Research Lettersinvestigates for the first time the possibility of using a “cocktail” of geoengineering tools to reduce changes in both temperature and precipitation caused by atmospheric greenhouse gases. Carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of coal, oil, and gas …
