Earth System Science and Modeling

Record cold and record warm temperatures across the planet can cause major and widespread impacts to life and property. But how frequent are these extreme temperature events? How do the frequencies of record warm events and record cold events compare, and have their relative frequencies changed over time? A new product funded by CPO's Climate Observations and Monitoring Program helps answers these questions.

Over the past 40 years, the Arctic sea ice minimum in September has declined, with 2007 to 2012 showing accelerated melt. However, this has been followed by a puzzling slowdown in sea ice decline more recently despite steady increases in greenhouse gas emissions. A team of scientists, funded in part by CPO's Climate Variability and Predictability Program, believes they have resolved part of the puzzle.

The workshop focused on a future aircraft campaign in the winter of 2021/2022 to investigate wintertime particulate matter in populated mountain basins of the western U.S.

NOAA’s Climate Program Office (CPO), part of NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, is announcing a total of $22.8 million in competitive awards to support 62 new projects. The diverse set of new projects ranges from explaining long-term trends in atmospheric composition to supporting resiliency in fishing communities.

This month, a research team, funded in part by CPO's Climate Observations and Monitoring Program and Modeling, Analysis, Predictions, and Projections Program, published an update to a weather “time machine” they’ve been developing since 2011. This third version of the 20th Century Reanalysis Project, or 20CRv3 for short, is a dauntingly complex, high-resolution, four-dimensional reconstruction of the global climate that estimates what the weather was for every day back to 1836.