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Categories: Environmental: Ecosystems, Geoscience: Severe Weather

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As more attention is drawn to possible severe weather around the world scientists are looking to improve planning for possible droughts, floods and other scenarios. A team of researchers created a new tool that will allow forecasting of El Nino Southern Oscillation by up to 18 months.

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Researchers have projected future marine heatwaves will cause coral reefs to be at severe risk of bleaching for longer periods than previously seen.

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Researchers have found a chemical clue in Italian limestone that explains a mass extinction of marine life in the Early Jurassic period, 183 million years ago. Volcanic activity pumped out CO2, warming oceans and lowering their oxygen levels. The findings may foretell the impact climate change and oxygen depletion might have on today's oceans.

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Clean, safe water is a limited resource and access to it depends on local bodies of water. But even dry regions have some water vapor in the air. To harvest small amounts of humidity, researchers developed a compact device with absorbent-coated fins that first trap moisture and then generate potable water when heated. They say the prototype could help meet growing demands for water, especially in arid locations.

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New biologist-designed shelters will help endangered frogs survive the devastating impacts of a deadly fungal disease by regulating their body temperature to fight off infections.

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There's a strong chance that last week's scorching temperatures were even hotter than reported for those living in underserved urban areas. New research from environmental engineers has shown that citizen science tools used to gauge heat in these urban areas likely understate the problem of heat islands due to a lack of weather stations. The researchers also suggest a statistical method to improve estimates of urban heat.

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There is a common belief that prescribed burning, thinning trees, and clearing underbrush reduce risks of the severity of future fires. But is that true? A new project analyzing 40 studies where wildfire burned into different vegetation treatments, spanning 11 western states. Researchers found overwhelming evidence that in seasonally dry mixed conifer forests in the western U.S., reducing surface and ladder fuels and tree density through thinning, coupled with prescribed burning or pile burning, could reduce future wildfire severity by more than 60% relative to untreated areas.

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A professor analyzes the conflicting impacts of human activities on extreme spring droughts.

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As part of an investigation to boost agricultural yields and develop crops that are resilient to climate change, Berkeley Lab scientists have introduced RhizoNet, a computational tool that harnesses the power of AI to transform how we study plant roots and root behavior under various environmental conditions. A paper describing their innovative deep-learning approach, combined with a unique hydroponic device that facilitates in-situ plant imaging, was published June 5 in Scientific Reports.

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Inland seas around the world are drying up due to increasing human water use and accelerating climate change, and their desiccation is releasing harmful dust that pollutes the surrounding areas during acute dust storms. Using the Great Salt Lake in Utah as a case study, researchers show that dust exposure was highest among Pacific Islanders and Hispanic people and lower in white people compared to all other racial/ethnic groups, and higher for individuals without a high school diploma. Restoring the lake would benefit everyone in the vicinity by reducing dust exposure, and it would also decrease the disparities in exposure between different racial/ethnic and socioeconomic groups.

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The carbon stored globally by plants is shorter-lived and more vulnerable to climate change than previously thought, according to a new study.

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A devastating hurricane transformed a monkey society by changing the pros and cons of interacting with others, new research shows.

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An international team of scientists has recently found that non-native species are expanding their ranges many orders of magnitude faster than native ones, in large part due to inadvertent human help. Even seemingly sedentary non-native plants are moving at three times the speed of their native counterparts in a race where, because of the rapid pace of climate change and its effect on habitat, speed matters. To survive, plants and animals need to be shifting their ranges by 3.25 kilometers per year just to keep up with the increasing temperatures and associated climactic shifts -- a speed that native species cannot manage without human help.

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Some areas of the Amazon rainforest are more resilient to drought than others, new research shows. But if not managed carefully, we could 'threaten the integrity of the whole system,' researchers say.

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Natural hazards can speed up the extinction process of land animals that have limited distribution and/or small populations. But there is hope to turn the negative development around, says researchers behind new study.

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Archipelago case-study shows that removing invasive rats and restoring native vegetation could help bring back hundreds of thousands of breeding pairs of seabirds lost to tropical islands. Calculating that there are enough fish to sustain restored seabird populations should be an important consideration for restoration projects, scientists say. Restored seabird populations also provide huge boost to the health of surrounding coral reef ecosystems through restored nutrient cycles.

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A new study shows soot from large wildfires in California traps sunlight, making days warmer and drier than they ought to be.

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Forecasters can use images in social media to better communicate weather related hazards of hurricanes, according to a pair of new studies.

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As the world's largest unfrozen freshwater resource, groundwater is crucial for life on Earth. Researchers have investigated how global warming is affecting groundwater temperatures and what that means for humanity and the environment. Their study indicates that by 2100, more than 75 million people are likely to be living in regions where the groundwater temperature exceeds the highest threshold set for drinking water by any country.

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Abrupt shifts within complex systems such as the Earth's climate system are extremely hard to predict. Researchers have now succeeded in developing a new method to anticipate such tipping points in advance. They successfully tested the reliability of their method using one of the most severe abrupt climate changes of the past: the shift of the once-green Sahara into a desert.