News

Aerosols,

aerosols

Small particles or droplets, such as wildfire smoke, volcanic gases, or salty sea spray, that float in the air. They are emitted by both natural events and human activities.

Source: NASA Global Climate Change Source

often emitted alongside greenhouse gases, can brighten clouds and cause significant cooling. However, the uncertainty associated with aerosol cloud interactions (ACI) is large and potentially significant enough to mask a sizable portion of greenhouse gas-related warming.

Formation of isoprene epoxydiol secondary organic aerosols

secondary organic aerosol (SOA)

Secondary Organic Aerosols (SOAs) are air pollutants emitted from natural and man-made sources. They are produced through a complex interaction of sunlight, volatile organic compounds from trees, plants, cars or industrial emissions, and other airborne chemicals.

Source: EPA Environmental Protection Agency Source

(IEPOX-SOA) represents a key pathway where anthropogenic and natural biogenic emissions interact through multiphase chemistry in the atmosphere. Despite over a decade of research in IEPOX-SOA formation, the reaction kinetics of IEPOX within aerosols remain uncertain.

Warm, humid, and unstable weather conditions are required for cumulus clouds to grow into thunderstorms. However, storms often fail to form despite seemingly favorable conditions.

The Australian bushfire season of 2019-20 was exceptional in size and duration. It also preceded an exceptionally long and unique La Niña event lasting from 2020-2023. This work explores the climate response to the fires and seeks to understand the specific links between the fires and La Niña.

Global climate models have started treating convective clouds with detailed cloud microphysics parameterizations. However, the representations of convective cloud microphysical processes are often based on those for large-scale stratiform clouds.

Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in collaboration with colleagues from nine other institutions, assessed the pattern similarity between modeled and observed atmospheric temperature changes. The observed changes are consistent with model simulations that include human emissions of greenhouse gases and cannot be reproduced by simulations that exclude human influence.

Researchers have predicted that our planet may be home to 1 trillion species of microbes.

microbe

Microbes are tiny living things that are found all around us and are too small to be seen by the naked eye. They live in water, soil, and in the air.

Source: NIH Source

Communities of these microorganisms, called microbiomes that exist in particular environments, are incredibly important to the health of everything from individual people to complete ecosystems.

ecosystem

A natural community of plants, animals, and other living organisms and the physical environment in which they live and interact.

Source: A student's guide to Global Climate Change Source

DOE’s Office of Science has selected 87 graduate students representing 33 states for the Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) program’s 2022 Solicitation 2 cycle. SCGSR prepares graduate students to enter jobs of critical importance to the DOE mission and secures our national position at the forefront of discovery and innovation.

We examine the response of the north Pacific wintertime flow during El Nino in AMIP experiments using process-oriented diagnostics. The analysis focuses on applying metrics of the Rossby Wave Source (RWS) and mid-latitude jet dynamics to determine their role in establishing the anomalous Pacific North America (PNA) pattern.

Gijs de Boer is an atmospheric scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder (CU-Boulder). Much of his research investigates the microphysics of both clouds and the boundary layer they inhabit―inquiries that often involve arctic weather and climate. Fittingly, his first name rhymes with “ice.”

Windstorms associated with intense synoptic-scale cyclones are an important natural hazard in the northeastern US. Here we provide a preliminary assessment of their response to global warming using a storyline-based pseudo-global warming framework.

On the westward side of the Rocky Mountains, the Upper Colorado River Basin has historically been a wintertime storage bin for snowpack, the compressed remnants of months of falling snow. As the snowpack melts, the resulting runoff joins water sources from other mountain watersheds

watershed

An area of land that channels rainfall and snowmelt to creeks, streams, and rivers, and eventually flows to the lowest point in a basin.

Source: USGS Source

and fills the coffers of streams and rivers fanning out into the Western United States.