As scientists work to predict how climate change may affect hurricanes, droughts, floods, blizzards and other severe weather, there’s one area that’s been overlooked: mild weather. But no more.

A new weather forecasting tool could soon find itself part of the day-to-day operations of NOAA's National Weather Service (NWS).

The instrument, called Atmospheric Emitted Radiance Interferometer, or AERI, measures temperature, water vapor and trace gases (like ozone, carbon monoxide and methane) in the lowest layer of Earth’s atmosphere, the troposphere. Now, an AERI project led by Tim Wagner, a scientist with NOAA’s Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, has received funding through NOAA’s Joint Technology Transfer Program.

Scientists studying coral reefs in volcanically acidified water of the southwestern Pacific Ocean measured a net loss of coral reef skeletons due to increased bio-erosion, according to new research by NOAA, the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies (CIMAS) and Australian scientists. 

We caught up with James Overland, oceanographer at NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Lab, to hear about his latest research on whether Arctic warming is fueling more severe winter weather in the mid-latitudes, the temperate zone of the Earth between the tropics and the Arctic, and the part of the United States where most Americans live.

The hole in the Earth’s ozone layer that forms over Antarctica each September grew to about 8.9 million square miles in 2016 before starting to recover, according to scientists from NOAA and NASA who monitor the annual phenomenon.