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| Mixing a chemical soup |
10.30.09 |
For decades, climate scientists have worked to identify and measure key substances -- notably greenhouse gases and aerosol particles -- that affect Earth’s climate. And they’ve been aided by ever more sophisticated computer models that make estimating the relative impact of each type of pollutant more reliable.
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| NASA celebrates Earth Science Week |
10.13.09 |
During the week of October 11-17, the world will be celebrating Earth Science Week and NASA has a major part in that celebration. NASA studies a variety of topics on Earth science, from climate change to hurricanes.
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| The ups and downs of global warming |
09.22.09 |
According to the vast majority of climate scientists, the planet is heating up. Scientists have concluded that this appears to be the result of increased human emissions of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, which trap heat near the surface of Earth.
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| 2009 Arctic ice results are in |
09.21.09 |
The Arctic sea ice cover appears to have reached its minimum extent for the year, the third-lowest extent recorded since satellites began measuring minimum sea ice extent in 1979, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
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| Space age water gauge |
09.16.09 |
Using satellite imagery, scientists have come up with a clever way to map agricultural water consumption, which may ultimately help us to get more crop per drop.
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| Gravity data sheds new light on ocean, climate |
08.27.09 |
By applying a method of calculating gravity that was first developed for the moon to data from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, known as Grace, JPL researchers have found a way to measure the pressure at the bottom of the ocean.
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| It's a bug's life |
08.21.09 |
Insects might not be as sexy as polar bears. But they are an incredibly important cog in the ecological wheel – they are the most diverse group of animals on Earth, represent more than half of all known living organisms, and pollinate nearly 80 percent of the world’s crops.
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| New vision for 'Eyes on the Earth' |
08.19.09 |
NASA’s "Eyes on the Earth 3D" is back and better than ever before. This online experience now offers new features that allow users to view the latest data beamed back from NASA space satellites - in some cases, less than a few hours old.
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| Ready for their close-up |
08.07.09 |
Following a year of calibration and validation by an international team of scientists, fully-validated, research-quality sea surface height data from the NASA/French Space Agency Ocean Surface Topography Mission/Jason-2 satellite are now available to the public. These "geophysical data record" products, as they are known, will be used primarily by climate researchers for climate monitoring and modeling.
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| Golden Aura |
08.03.09 |
Earth would be a very different place without its atmosphere, which protects life on Earth and is a crucial part of our climate. NASA's Aura satellite, which just turned five, monitors the state of our atmosphere and has uncovered new clues about the 'shield' above us.
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| Eye on aerosols |
07.23.09 |
A NASA research plane spent the month of June crisscrossing the southern Great Plains in search of more detailed information on the least understood variable in long-term climate change scenarios.
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| El Niño, now and then |
07.21.09 |
The Topex/Poseidon satellite image on the left shows details about sea surface height in the eastern equatorial Pacific from June 1997, months before the historic 1997-1998 El Niño event. The image on the right, from NASA's Jason-2, shows conditions in June of this year.
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| Accident summary |
07.20.09 |
A NASA panel that investigated the unsuccessful Feb. 24 launch of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, or OCO, has completed its report.
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| Headed for the White House |
07.14.09 |
Josh Willis, an oceanographer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., has been honored by President Barack Obama with the 2009 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. The award is the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on young professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers.
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| On thinner ice |
07.08.09 |
Arctic sea ice thinned dramatically between the winters of 2004 and 2008, with thin seasonal ice replacing thick older ice as the dominant type for the first time on record. The new results, based on data from a NASA Earth-orbiting spacecraft, provide further evidence for the rapid, ongoing transformation of the Arctic's ice cover.
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| QuikScat's Greatest Hits |
06.23.09 |
NASA's QuikScat satellite is 10 years old this month. Short for 'Quick Scatterometer," QuikScat has spent a decade tracking the surface winds that whip up our seas, using a microwave radar system (a scatterometer) in orbit around our planet.
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| 10 years of wind-watching |
06.22.09 |
NASA's Quick Scatterometer, or QuikScat, mission was conceived, developed and launched less than two years after the unexpected loss of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Advanced Earth Observing Satellite-1 spacecraft, which carried the NASA Scatterometer in June 1997. Just two years later, on June 19, 1999, the QuikScat spacecraft carrying JPL's SeaWinds instrument was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif.
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| Close to home |
06.17.09 |
This web page will introduce and lead you through the content of the most comprehensive and authoritative report of its kind. The report summarizes the science and the impacts of climate change on the United States, now and in the future.
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| Famine early warning system |
06.10.09 |
Almost all of the 300 families in the southwest Afghanistan town of Sya Kamarak, a day's drive along broken roads from the nearest city, live off the land. When the rains failed in April and May 2008, farmers lost most of their wheat harvest -- an annual crop down sixty percent from previous years. Three families had already lost children to starvation; the drought threatened to take more.
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| Danger zone |
05.28.09 |
The U.S. soybean crop is suffering nearly $2 billion in damage a year due to rising surface ozone concentrations harming plants and reducing the crop’s yield potential, a NASA-led study has concluded.
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| Breaking the ice |
04.30.09 |
NASA will 'break the ice' on a pair of new airborne radars that can help monitor climate change when a team of scientists embarks this week on a two-month expedition to the vast, frigid terrain of Greenland and Iceland.
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| With a pinch of salt |
04.20.09 |
We know that average sea levels have risen over the past century, and that global warming is to blame. But what is climate change doing to the saltiness, or salinity, of our oceans?
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| Breaking through the clouds |
04.14.09 |
In the second of our stories on Cyclone Nargis we report new research showing that the cyclone's landfall position could have been much better predicted.
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| Sun watcher |
03.25.09 |
During the Maunder Minimum, a period of diminished solar activity between 1645 and 1715, sunspots were rare on the face of the sun, sometimes disappearing entirely for months to years.
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| Turning the tide to energy |
03.05.09 |
NASA researchers who developed a new way to power robotic underwater vehicles believe a spin-off technology could help convert ocean energy into electrical energy on a much larger scale. The researchers hope that clean, renewable energy produced from the motion of the ocean and rivers could potentially meet an important part of the world's demand for electricity.
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| What's in a name? Global warming vs. climate change |
12.05.08 |
The Internet is full of references to global warming. The Union of Concerned Scientists website on climate change is titled "Global Warming," just one of many examples. But we don't use global warming much on this website. We use the less appealing "climate change." Why?
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| Carbon-sniffing sleuth |
11.12.08 |
NASA's first spacecraft dedicated to studying carbon dioxide, the leading human-produced greenhouse gas driving changes in Earth's climate, has arrived at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., to begin final launch preparations.
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| Tracking Earth's most abundant greenhouse gas |
10.31.08 |
JPL scientists, satellites and ground-based instruments are contributing to a month-long, university-led experiment on Hawaii's Mauna Loa volcano to track water vapor in Earth's sub-tropics, which affects global temperatures, and rainfall in North America.
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| Climate change seeps into the sea |
10.21.08 |
The ocean has helped slow the effects of global warming by absorbing much of the excess heat-trapping carbon dioxide that has been going into the atmosphere since the start of the Industrial Revolution. All that extra carbon dioxide, however, has been a bitter pill for the ocean to swallow.
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| Blowing in the wind |
07.09.08 |
Efforts to harness the energy potential of Earth's ocean winds could soon gain an important new tool: global satellite maps from NASA. Scientists have been creating maps using nearly a decade of data from NASA's QuikScat satellite that reveal ocean areas where winds could produce energy.
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| Crystal ball |
07.08.08 |
Imagine the lives that could be saved from flash floods and drought, the millions of dollars in fuel costs that could be avoided for fishing vessels, and the homes that could be spared from the effects of coastline erosion if only scientists could more accurately predict the dynamics of Earth's often unpredictable oceans.
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| Vantage point |
07.02.08 |
A new infrared image taken by JPL's ASTER instrument on NASA's Terra satellite shows the frightening path of destruction of a uncontained wildfire near Big Sur, California.
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| Reading, writing and reefs |
06.05.08 |
Size doesn't always equal importance, but in the case of Earth's ocean, it does. So when a college student piped up with “It’s big!” as the answer to a question about why one should study the ocean, his professor agreed. In fact, he would argue that “it’s big” is one of the most significant things we should know about the ocean.
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| New satellite to tackle lingering mysteries of the deep blue sea |
06.04.08 |
Scientists hope a new follow-on mission to the Jason-1 and Topex/Poseidon satellite missions, equipped with the latest high-tech instruments, will bring them closer to answering broad fundamental questions: How does ocean circulation vary from season to season, from year to year and from decade to decade? How much can the ocean change from natural and human-induced causes? In what ways does the ocean impact human activities?
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| The A-Train |
05.27.08 |
Using data from instruments in a constellation of NASA satellites, scientists have discovered that they can see deep inside of clouds. The satellites are taking first-of-a-kind measurements, shedding new light on the link between clouds, pollution and rainfall.
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| La Niña lingers |
04.21.08 |
Boosted by the influence of a larger climate event in the Pacific, one of the strongest La Niñas in many years is slowly weakening but continues to blanket the Pacific Ocean near the equator, as shown by new sea-level height data collected by the U.S.-French Jason oceanographic satellite.
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| Ice loss speeds up |
01.23.08 |
Ice loss in Antarctica increased by 75 percent in the last 10 years due to a speed-up in the flow of its glaciers and is now nearly as great as that observed in Greenland, according to a new, comprehensive study by NASA and university scientists.
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