News by Subject Atmospheric Science

One of the leading thinkers in nano-science has called on the energy materials community to help finally put an end to the world's reliance on fossil fuels.

Chinese researchers along with international colleagues recently reported a 6,700-year-long, precisely dated and well-calibrated tree-ring stable isotope chronology from the Northeastern Tibetan Plateau.

A new approach to analyse satellite measurements of Earth's cloud cover reveals that clouds are very likely to enhance global heating.

Investigating how climate affects intense rainstorms across Europe, climate experts have shown there will be a significant future increase in the occurrence of slow-moving intense rainstorms. The scientists estimate that these slow-moving storms may be 14 times more frequent across land by the end of the century. It is these slow-moving storms that have the potential for very high precipitation accumulations, with devastating impacts, as we saw in Germany and Belgium.

An international team of scientists from Australia, USA, and France have analysed how the deep Pacific exchanges water with the surface ocean.

Satellite observations of XCO2 show greater biases apparently over oceans than over the land surface. However, no effective ways to evaluate space-time XCO2 variations over wide geographical areas exist. Observations on commercial ship tracks and aircraft routes, together with atmospehric model calculations, provide a new reference XCO2 dataset for the otherwise inaccesible areas of the world. High quality satellite observations are a requirement for better understanding of the carbon cycle in response to climate change.

Earth's climate was relatively stable for a long period of time. For three billion years, temperatures were mostly warm and carbon dioxide levels high - until a shift occurred about 400 million years ago. A new study suggests that the change at this time was accompanied by a fundamental alteration to the carbon-silicon cycle.