Life-Threatening Blizzard Poised to Strike New England
A life-threatening and historic blizzard that could rank among the top 10 snowstorms on record in southern New England is poised to plaster the region this weekend with snow that will be measured in feet rather than inches. The storm could also cause major coastal flooding and produce hurricane force wind gusts, forecasters said.… Read More
Historic, Crippling Blizzard May Strike New England
Early February is a notorious time of year for bringing major storms to New England, with the benchmark storm, known as the Blizzard of ‘78, occurring 35 years ago this week. That storm caused damaging coastal flooding, dumped well over 2 feet of snow in Massachusetts, and trapped many people in their cars. In Boston, 27.1 inches of snow fell, in… Read More
Major Storm Accelerated Arctic Sea Ice Loss, Study Finds
The study found that while the extraordinarily powerful storm did in fact accelerate the melting of Arctic sea ice, the sea ice extent record would have occurred regardless of whether the storm had hit.… Read More
Ozone Hole’s Shifting Winds May Sap Major Carbon Sink
High above Antarctica, the atmosphere is slowly recovering from the decades-long barrage of manmade chemicals that ate a hole in the protective ozone layer. But the legacy of that destruction lingers. Scientists have linked the ozone hole that forms each Antarctic spring, high above Earth, to changes in the fierce band of winds that swirls around… Read More
Research Spawns Stunning Hurricane Sandy Animations
Mel Shapiro, an atmospheric scientist who studies how tropical storms and hurricanes transition into powerful extratropical storm systems, recently produced a series of astonishing animated visualizations showing the inner workings of Sandy as the storm moved up the Eastern Seaboard and eventually made landfall on the evening of Oct. 29. … Read More
Report Underscores Vulnerabilities of U.S. Coastlines
No part of the U.S. will escape the harsh consequences of climate change, which has already begun to cause trouble from Alaska to Florida, and from Maine to Hawaii, and which will worsen as the century goes on. But according to a report released January 28, the nation’s coastlines — Atlantic, Gulf, Pacific and Great Lakes — are likely to get the wo… Read More
Risks of Hurricane Sandy-like Surge Events Rising
Timothy M. Hall, a climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, and Adam Sobel, a researcher at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Observatory, set out to investigate how common Hurricane Sandy’s impact angle was under static climate conditions. Given that global average temperatures are rising, their findings supp… Read More
Greenland’s Ice Sheet More Stable Than Once Believed
The enormous sheets of ice that lie atop Greenland may not be as prone to catastrophic melting as many scientists thought, even if the planet continues to warm and temperatures remain high for hundreds of years. But while that may sound like good news, new evidence also suggests that parts of the even vaster ice sheets that lie atop Antarctica … Read More
