Local climate may be more important than carbon dioxide levels in determining what types of plants thrive and what types don't do so well, a team of scientists reports in this week's edition of the journal Science. (University of Florida release)

A new study changes the equation for everything from global climate to understanding the ocean's basic chemistry. (University of Rochester release)

As thousands of acres continue to burn across the western United States, scientists are flying over wildfires in the Pacific Northwest to measure mercury emissions in their smoke. (National Center for Atmospheric Research/ University Corporation for Atmospheric Research release)

In the northwest foothills of the Alaska Range, the last 150 years have been warm by historical reckoning, scientists report. However, they note, two other lengthy periods of climatic warmth appear to have occurred in that region during the last 2,000 years. (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign release)

Launching what will be the first sky-based study of Puget Sound's air quality, scientists from the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory will fly Seattle's periodically hazy skies this month in search of answers about regional ozone and other pollutants. (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Release)

Despite its tropical origin, the upper two-thirds of a typical hurricane is largely ice. Scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) are bringing unique cloud-profiling instruments into this mysterious realm in a NASA-sponsored project to help improve hurricane forecasting and modeling. (University Corporation for Atmospheric Research Release)

University of Massachusetts researchers will be flying into the eyes of hurricanes again this year, using high-tech weather sensors developed at the University. (University of Massachusetts Amherst Release)