Mother Nature can also be dangerous. This summer, wildfires burned through Spain, floods devastated parts of the Midwest, and a huge hail storm blew through Mexico. As global warming continues, these kinds of events are likely to become more common, although they may not become more predictable...
Some scientists predict that nuclear winter would be followed by an even harsher spring. They theorize that the sunlight bounced back up from the smokecloudswould heat up nitrogen oxides in the stratosphere. At high temperatures, the nitrogen oxides, which formed due to blast-burned oxygen, would...
“Even if you have a great smoke model and get the weather correct, you have to deal with all the unknowns on where the fires are, which ones are active and how much smoke they’re creating,” said Farren Herron-Thorpe, a modeling and emissions inventory scientist with the Department of...
"We have an archive of satellite image data going back 40 years," Christopher Potter, research scientist at NASA Ames, tells me as we sit in a room at the space agency's Silicon Valley campus. "That gives us a very rich data set to build predictive models from." As w...
whose articles have been published in Physics World, New Scientist, Astronomy Magazine, All About Space, Newsweek and ZME Science. He also writes about science communication for Elsevier and the European Journal of Physics. Rob holds a bachelor of science degree in physics and astronomy from the...
The study, however, found that parts of Texas and New Mexico were also impacted, just not as much as the other regions. "This is about extreme trends that are the outcome of physical interactions we might not completely understand," said lead author Kai Kornhuber, an adjunct scientis...
Wildfire is a major driver of nitrogen (N) cycling and export from terrestrial to aquatic systems. While fire is a natural process in many watersheds, it can still degrade water quality by rapidly flushing N to streams. This can be particularly problematic in watersheds that experience high le...
"Hurricanes are extremely challenging and their impacts are multifold," said Karthik Balaguru, an Earth scientist at PNNL. "You have the extreme winds associated with the storm, of course, but then you can have slow-moving storms like Harvey in 2017, which can produce humongous amounts of pr...
The speed limit on hurricane winds is relatively easy to calculate, said James Kossin, a climate scientist who is retired from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and now consults for the climate risk modeling agency First Street. Sign up for the Live Science daily newslet...
Applied mathematics can be a powerful tool in helping predict the genesis and evolution of different types of cancers, a study from the University of Waterloo has found.