Predicting how climate change will affect the incidence of infectious diseases would have great public health benefits. But the relationship between climate and disease is extraordinarily complex, making such predictions difficult. Simply identifying correlations and statistical associations between climatic factors and disease won’t be enough, said Princeton University researcher Jessica Metcalf. Instead, researchers need new statistical models that incorporate both climate factors and the climate–disease relationship, accounting for uncertainties in both.

When the strong winds that circle the Arctic slacken, cold polar air can escape and cause extreme winter chills in parts of the Northern hemisphere. A new study finds that these weak states have become more persistent over the past four decades and can be linked to cold winters in Russia and Europe. It is the first to show that changes in winds high up in the stratosphere substantially contributed to the observed winter cooling trend in northern Eurasia. While it is still a subject of research how the Arctic under climate change impacts the rest of the world, this study lends further support that a changing Arctic impacts the weather across large swaths of the Northern Hemisphere population centers.

The onset of the last ice age may have forced some bird species to abandon their northerly migrations for thousands of years, says new research led by a University of Nebraska-Lincoln ornithologist.

Gravity waves form in the atmosphere as a result of destabilizing processes, for example at weather fronts, during storms or when air masses stroke over mountain ranges. They can occasionally be seen in the sky as bands of cloud. For weather forecast and climate models, however, they are mostly “invisible” due to their short wavelength. The effects of gravity waves can only be taken into consideration by including additional special components in the models. The “MS-GWaves” research unit funded by the German Research Foundation and led by Goethe University Frankfurt has meanwhile further developed such parameterizations and will test them in the second funding period.

Researchers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Geophysical Institute are exploring the changing chemistry of the Arctic’s atmosphere to help answer the question of what happens as snow and ice begin to melt.

With the help of satellite observations from 188 lakes worldwide, scientists at the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB) have shown that the warming of large lakes amplifies their colour. Lakes which are green due to their high phytoplankton content tend to become greener in warm years as phytoplankton content increases. Clear, blue lakes with little phytoplankton, on the other hand, tend to become even bluer in warm years caused by declines in phytoplankton. Thus, contrary to previous assumptions, the warming of lakes tends to amplify their richness or poverty of phytoplankton.

Could decreases in temperature cause heart failure and death?

New research from a team of Florida State University scientists and their collaborators is helping to explain the link between a changing global climate and a dramatic decline in bumble bee populations worldwide.

Explosive volcanic eruptions in the tropics can lead to El Niño events, those notorious warming periods in the Pacific Ocean with dramatic global impacts on the climate, according to a new study.

Researchers at the University of Regina have recently launched a new climate change tool designed to help project future climate changes.

The tool, called the Canada Climate Change Data Portal (CCCDP), was developed by researchers in the University of Regina’s Institute for Energy Environment and Sustainable Communities (IEESC).