“There’s a debate about how cities affect rainfall,” Shepherd answers. “There are several hypotheses about what is going on, but they primarily involve the urban land use and urban aerosols.” The ...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated in their most recent report that global surface temperature at the end of this century will probably be between 1.8 and 4 degrees Celsius warmer ...

Episodic shifts in winds and water currents across the equatorial Pacific can cause floods in the South American desert while stalling and drying up the monsoon in Indonesia and India. Atmospheric ...

The creosote bush (Larrea tridentata) is a medium-sized evergreen shrub. It has small pointed green leaves with a waxy coating. These leaves have adapted to conserve water and survive high ...

Desertification. The word invokes images of sand dunes blowing over abandoned farms as some irresistible, dark force steadily transforms fertile fields into inhospitable wasteland. The United Nations’ ...

The warm, shallow ocean waters of the tropics have talkative “forests” of their own. Brightly colored mounds of coral grow in the warm ocean waters, quickly when nutrients are plentiful and more ...

Phytoplankton thrive along coastlines and continental shelves, along the equator in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, and in high-latitude areas. Winds play a strong role in the distribution of ...

To understand how the Earth’s climate system balances the energy budget, we have to consider processes occurring at the three levels: the surface of the Earth, where most solar heating takes place; ...

Welcome, teachers, to Mission: Biomes! This site was designed for teachers to use in classrooms as a supplementary, interdisciplinary unit. Mission: Biomes is especially appropriate for grades 3 ...

Michael Carlowicz was managing editor of NASA’s Earth Observatory from 2010 to 2022. He has written about Earth science and geophysics since 1991 for several NASA divisions, the Woods Hole ...

Mauna Loa is indeed an active volcano; it last erupted in 1950, 1975, and 1984. Between eruptions, it emits variable amounts of carbon dioxide (CO 2) and sulfur dioxide (SO 2) from fissures at the ...

Air temperatures on Earth have been rising since the Industrial Revolution. While natural variability plays some part, the preponderance of evidence indicates that human activities—particularly ...