News by Subject Atmospheric Science

Up to 15 million hectares of the Brazilian Amazon is at risk of losing its legal protection, according to a new study from researchers at Chalmers University of Technology and KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, and the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. This is equivalent to more than 4 times the entire forest area of the UK.

New supercomputer simulations by climate scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have shown that climate change intensified the amount of rainfall in recent hurricanes such as Katrina, Irma, and Maria by 5 to 10 percent. They further found that if those hurricanes were to occur in a future world that is warmer than present, those storms would have even more rainfall and stronger winds.

Princeton and University of Iowa researchers found that Houston's urban landscape directly contributed to the torrential rainfall and deadly flooding of Hurricane Harvey in 2017. They report in the journal Nature that Houston's risk for extreme flooding was 21 times greater due to urbanization. The results highlight the human role in extreme weather events and the need to consider urban and suburban development when calculating hurricane risk.

Companies that fail to curb their carbon output may eventually face the consequences of asset devaluation and stock price depreciation, according to a new study out of the University of Waterloo.

Many people see the carbon cycle as vertical -- CO2 moving up and down between soil, plants and the atmosphere. However, new Michigan State University research published in the current issue of Geophysical Research Letters, adds a dimension to the vertical perspective by showing how water moves massive amounts of carbon laterally through ecosystems -- especially during floods. These findings -- which analyzed more than 1,000 watersheds, covering about 75 percent of the contiguous US -- have implications for climate change and water quality.

University of Maine researchers have reanalyzed global annual precipitation using quantile regression to reveal overlooked trends. Linear trends in US and global climate assessments reflect changes in mean annual precipitation, but these may not reflect changes across other quantiles in the precipitation probability distribution, including tails (very high and low precipitation levels), leading to systematic mischaracterization of climate risk. Applications in future climate studies could allow for risk assessment at more appropriate adaptation targets.