Out of sync

Feature Story

Seasons are shifting, but some creatures—and laws—aren't

Spring rain in the city

UCAR Digital Image Library

Taxi seen through a rain-spattered windshield

Spying the secrets of planets beyond our solar system

Profiles in Science

Tim Brown, NCAR's High Altitude Observatory

Field Deployments

Site Spotlight

NCAR Earth Observing Laboratory

Scheduled building closure - Mesa Lab only

Saturday, April 14 info >

NCAR & UCAR News

Scientist examines laser instrument for measuring snow

Scientists deploy lasers, GPS technology to improve snow measurements

February 13, 2012

Scientists are working to solve a critical wintertime weather mystery: how to accurately measure the amount of snow on the ground.

Study may answer longstanding questions about Little Ice Age

January 30, 2012

Volcanic eruptions and resulting changes to sea ice and ocean currents may be the cause.

Opinion

The Great Warm Wave: A top-10 list

Bob Henson | March 23, 2012 • The last 10 days have brought what may be the gentlest round of extreme weather ever to grace the United States. It’s hard to think of March temperatures in the 70s and 80s as anything other than delightful...

Risky business

February 6, 2012 • The year 2011 was painful for the reinsurance industry—the companies that insure other insurance companies against especially big losses—thanks to the tsunami in Japan, earthquakes in New Zealand, floods in Australia and the U.S....

News from UCAR Members & Affiliates

The Cape Grim Baseline Air Pollution Station in Tasmania

Fertilizer use responsible for increase in nitrous oxide in atmosphere

Chemists have found a smoking gun proving that increased fertilizer use over the past 50 years is responsible for a dramatic rise in atmospheric nitrous oxide.

University of California, Berkeley

One downside of early spring: a drop in Rocky Mt. Butterflies

The early arrival of spring across the U.S. undoubtedly has warmed the hearts of many people, but for flowering plants and pollinating insects, the trend toward earlier springs brings complicated, and not always good, results.

University of Maryland

Research in Brief

A man with an umbrella walks through floodwaters in Ambala, India, July 2010

Climate variation, change, or both?

March 28, 2012 | Burning fossil fuels has led to a warmer, moister atmosphere and a shifting background for extreme weather and climate events, according to a new study by NCAR scientist Kevin Trenberth. Published in the journal Climatic Change, the analysis puts a wide range of noteworthy weather events from the last two years in the context of a warming and moistening global climate.

A hot-looking yellow Sun over the ocean, with seagulls in the foreground.

Hot summers increasing in the U.S.

March 1, 2012 | A new study in the journal Climatic Change finds that extremely warm summers are not only occurring more frequently in the contiguous United States, but are likely to become normal by mid-century if the world continues its business-as-usual rate of greenhouse gas emissions.