NOAA issued its busiest preseason hurricane forecast yet, with the second highest accumulated cyclone energy. An atmospheric scientist explains what’s behind the numbers.
Months before winter arrives, traders are watching for clues in the long-range weather forecasts.
Mario Tama/Getty Images
Option price swings show how much traders believe seasonal climate and weather matters for all sorts of industries, not just the ones you might expect.
La Niña typically means cooler, wetter conditions on average globally, but not everywhere, and not every time.
Luis Robayo/AFP via Getty Images
After a year of record-breaking global heat with El Niño, will La Niña bring a reprieve? That depends on where you live and how you feel about hurricanes.
The 2023 megafires burnt more than 84 million hectares of desert and savannah in northern Australia. That’s larger than the whole of NSW, or more than three times size of the UK.
It’s not just ocean temperatures that determine whether we have El Niño or La Niña. Air circulation also plays a role, and it’s changing in unexpected ways.
2023’s weather has been extreme in many ways.
AP Photo/Michael Probst
Kevin Trenberth, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau
2016 was the world’s warmest year on record, due in part to a very strong El Niño event. But 2023 (and 2024) could beat that record – what should we expect?
Warm water along the equator off South America signals an El Niño, like this one in 2016.
NOAA
Where there’s fire, there’s smoke – could plumes from the Black Summer of fire have cooled regions of the Pacific and triggered a La Niña? New research suggests it’s possible.
We can now monitor coastal changes across thousands of beaches over the last 40 years, from Australia, New Zealand and Japan, to Chile, Peru, Mexico and California. Here’s what our new tool uncovered.