News by Subject Atmospheric Science

New research explores the effects fire has on ecosystems and the wildlife species that inhabit them. Scientists examined the impacts of fires of different severity levels on birds and how that changes as the time since fire increases. Scientists looked across 10 fires after they burned through forests in the Sierra Nevada. A key finding was that wildfire had strong, but varied, effects on the density of many of the bird species that were studied.

Global climate change is already affecting the planet, as demonstrated by the shrinking polar ice cap, melting glaciers and cities in the grips of longer, more intense heat waves. Now a team of researchers has conducted a radical thought experiment on how extreme land use changes could influence future climate.

Short-term management responses to climate change-mediated disasters can be maladaptive in the long-term.

New research from Columbia Engineering Professor Pierre Gentine demonstrates that machine-learning techniques can be used to accurately represent clouds and their atmospheric heating and moistening, and better represent clouds in coarse resolution climate models, with the potential to narrow the range of climate prediction. This could be a major advance in accurate predictions of global warming in response to increased greenhouse gas concentrations that are essential for policy-makers (e.g. the Paris climate agreement).

Researchers examined city water policies over the course of four years to create a database of water conservation policies. They also developed an associated index of the number of different categories of policies each city adopted and gathered data on the climate, water sources, population, economy and political leanings of each city and its surrounding metropolitan statistical area -- as reflected in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections.

A Princeton University-led study in the journal Nature Geosciences examined the global carbon cycle and suggests that scientists may have misgauged how carbon is distributed around the world, particularly between the northern and southern hemispheres. The results could change projections of how, when and where the currently massive levels of atmospheric carbon will result in environmental changes such as ocean acidification.