Shifts in Rice Farming Practices in China Reduce Greenhouse Gas Methane
December 19 — Changes to farming practices in rice paddies in China may have led to a decrease in methane emissions, and an observed decline in the rate that methane has entered the Earth’s atmosphere over the last 20 years, a NASA-funded study finds. More

Launch Gives Weather Forecasters Twin Wind Watchers
December 16 — Weather and climate forecasters will double their pleasure, thanks to today's successful launch of NASA’s SeaWinds scatterometer instrument. More

NASA Data Indicates El Niño Will Intensify and Move East
December 12 — Satellite data shows that warmer than normal waters are in the central Pacific Ocean unlike the last El Nino More

NASA Know-How Will Reduce Automotive Emissions
December 11 — NASA’s laser technology may soon be part of your car’s exhaust system. More

NASA Tree-Ring Study Reveals Long History of El Niño
December 9 — El Niño is not a new weather phenomenon, according to a recent NASA study that looks 750 years into the past using tree-ring records. More

Arctic Sea Ice Shrinking, Greenland Ice Sheet Melting, According to Study
December 7 — The total area of surface melt on the Greenland Ice Sheet for 2002 broke all known records for the island and the extent of Arctic sea ice reached the lowest level in the satellite record, according to scientists at the University of Colorado at Boulder. More

NASA’s First Gravity Mission Image Depicts a Bumpy Ride
December 6 — The first image released from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (Grace), a joint NASA-German Aerospace Center mission, graphically illustrates the sensitivity of the mission’s twin spacecraft to changes in Earth’s gravity. More

Latest Ocean Winds Research Creates a Stir
December 6 — New research findings from NASA’s Quick Scatterometer (QuikScat) satellite and its SeaWinds instrument have documented for the first time the significant effect typhoons have on the ocean and ocean life. The findings will be presented during a press conference highlighting recent research and findings from QuikScat at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union on Saturday, December 7, at 8 a.m. Pacific Time. More

NASA Research Offers Explanation for Earth’s Bulging Waistline
December 6 — A team of researchers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., and the Royal Observatory of Belgium has apparently solved a recently observed mystery regarding changes to the physical shape of Earth and its gravity field. The answer, they found, appears to lie in the melting of sub-polar glaciers and mass shifts in the Southern, Pacific and Indian Oceans associated with global-scale climate changes. More

NASA Devising Method to Remotely Monitor Ocean Environment
December 6 — Low-flying airplanes could scan seas to efficiently determine coral reef health, according to a NASA scientist who will discuss her research Dec. 8 during the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. More

Laser Technology Helps Measure Pollution from NYC Buses
December 6 — Atmospheric scientists used laser technology while riding in traffic behind New York City transit buses to find out exactly how much and what type of pollution different types of buses emit in their exhausts, and the results were surprising. More

Waves in the Atmosphere Batter South Pole, Shrink 2002 Ozone Hole
December 6 — A greater number of large “planetary sized waves” in the atmosphere that move from the lower atmosphere into the upper atmosphere were responsible for the smaller Antarctic ozone hole this fall, according to NASA researchers. More

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