As the West warms, a drier Colorado River system could see as much as a one-in-two chance of fully depleting all of its reservoir storage by mid-century assuming current management practices continue on course, according to a new University of Colorado at Boulder study.

Entrepreneurs at ESA's Business Incubation centre in the Netherlands have used radar technology from the agency's Envisat remote-sensing satellite to develop a compact, high-resolution radar that can monitor land and buildings from small aircraft. The radar can monitor structures such as dams, harbours, canals and buildings, leading to maps for urban planning, territory surveillance and cadastral updating. Several flights over the same location can spot changes between pictures, revealing ground movements that could affect structures.

Scientists using 2009 NASA satellite data have reported a rapid and extreme loss of the oldest and thickest types of ice from within the Arctic Ocean. Since 1988, the oldest ice types have declined 74 percent and today cover only two percent of the Arctic Ocean, compared to 20 percent coverage in the 1980s. A team of experts from NASA, the University of Colorado, Boulder, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, Fort Hays State University, Kansas and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado are conducting an unmanned aircraft expedition to study the receding Arctic sea ice to better understand its life cycle and the long-term stability of the Arctic ice cover.

Establishing a key link between the solar cycle and global climate, research led by scientists at the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., shows that maximum solar activity and its aftermath have impacts on Earth that resemble La Nina and El Nino events in the tropical Pacific Ocean.

Scientists at The Florida State University's Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies (COAPS) have developed a new computer model that they hope will predict with unprecedented accuracy how many hurricanes will occur in a given season. After about five years developing and assessing the model, Associate Scholar Scientist Tim LaRow and his COAPS colleagues are putting the system to the test this year with their first-ever hurricane forecast. The COAPS model is one of only a handful of so-called "dynamical models" in the world being used to study seasonal hurricane activity.

Earth's 4.5-billion-year history is filled with several turning points when temperatures changed dramatically, asteroids bombarded the planet and life forms came and disappeared. But one of the biggest moments in Earth's lifetime is the Cambrian explosion of life, roughly 540 million years ago, when complex, multi-cellular life burst out all over the planet.

A fleet of airplanes outfitted with sensors set out in the spring and summer of 2008 to study pollution in the Arctic atmosphere -- observing pollution from humans in the spring portion and from naturally occurring fires in the summer. Among other goals, the Arctic Research of the Composition of the Troposphere from Aircraft and Satellites (ARCTAS) field campaign sought to piece together a more detailed picture of how widespread forest fires above the Arctic Circle influence the rapid warming taking place at the north pole. Then all the smoke nearly got in the way.

Past Earth Science and Climate Change News

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