From atop this grassy mesa in 1967, scientists with the federal Environmental Science Services Agency carefully launched a weather balloon carrying a new instrument that could measure ozone levels from the ground to the very edge of outer space -- and radio the data back to a ground receiver.

The United States is considering a $1 trillion budget proposal to update infrastructure, including its crumbling bridges. An obstacle to spending the money wisely is that the current means of assessing bridges may underestimate their vulnerability, according to a new study published in the Journal of Infrastructure Systems. 

Case in point is a bridge along California’s iconic Big Sur coast, which collapsed in March, isolating communities and costing local businesses millions of dollars. Although California’s recent unprecedented rains were likely to damage infrastructure, standard risk assessments made it hard to identify which bridges were most vulnerable.

Tropical rainforests are often described as the “lungs of the earth,” able to essentially inhale carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and exhale oxygen in return. The faster they grow, the more they mitigate climate change by absorbing CO2.

This role has made them a hot research topic, as scientists question what will happen to this vital carbon sink long-term as temperatures rise and rainfall increases.

Conventional wisdom has held that forest growth will dramatically slow with high levels of rainfall. But CU Boulder researchers this month turned that assumption on its head with an unprecedented review of data from 150 forests that concluded just the opposite.

The ability of some Western conifer forests to recover after severe fire may become increasingly limited as the climate continues to warm, according to a new study published today in Global Change Biology, by ?HF Senior Ecologist Jonathan Thompson and fellow scientists from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute (SCBI) and UVA.

Although most of the evergreen trees in the study region are well adapted to fire, the study examined whether two likely facets of climate change — hotter, drier conditions and larger, more frequent and severe wildfires — could potentially transform landscapes from forested to shrub-dominated systems.

Vertical wind shear can weaken a tropical cyclone and that's what's happening to the now weaker Tropical Depression Muifa in the Northwestern Pacific Ocean. NASA gathered rainfall information about the storm as wind shear continued to weaken it.

The Global Precipitation Measurement mission or GPM core observatory satellite again passed over Tropical Storm Muifa in the western Pacific Ocean on April 26, 2017 at 0721 UTC (3:21 a.m. EDT). GPM data revealed that there was very little precipitation around Muifa's low level center of circulation. A red tropical storm symbol shows the approximate location of tropical storm Muifa's center. Rain was measured by GPM's Dual-Frequency Precipitation Radar (DPR) falling at a rate of over 193 mm (7.6 inches) per hour in storms located well to the east of the tropical cyclone's center.

Price peaks of wheat on the world market are mainly caused by production shocks such as induced for example by droughts, researchers found. These shocks get exacerbated by low storage levels as well as protective trade policies, the analysis of global data deriving from the US Department of Agriculture shows. In contrast to widespread assumptions, neither speculation across stock or commodity markets nor land-use for biofuel production were decisive for annual wheat price changes in the past four decades. This finding allows for better risk assessment. Soaring global crop prices in some years can contribute to local food crises, and climate change from burning fossil fuels and emitting greenhouse gases is increasing weather variability.

Ice cores drilled from a glacier in a cave in Transylvania offer new evidence of how Europe's winter weather and climate patterns fluctuated during the last 10,000 years, known as the Holocene period.

The cores provide insights into how the region's climate has changed over time. The researchers' results, published this week in the journal Scientific Reports, could help reveal how the climate of the North Atlantic region, which includes the U.S., varies on long time scales.

The UK-based Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH) has led an international team of scientists who reveal global warming is responsible for a tripling in the frequency of extreme West African Sahel storms observed in just the last 35 years.

Professor Christopher Taylor, a Meteorologist at CEH, and researchers from partner institutions including Universite? Grenoble Alpes in France, also suggest that climate change will see the Sahel experience many more instances of extreme rain in future.

Hot on the heels of the second warmest winter in the 138-year record, March continued the global warm trend that could last well into this year — especially with increasing chances for the arrival of El Nino by late summer or fall.  

The study appears in the journal Biological Conservation.

The maps describing species’ geographic ranges, which are used by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to determine threat status, appear to systematically overestimate the size of the habitat in which species can thrive, said Don Melnick, senior investigator on the study and the Thomas Hunt Morgan Professor of Conservation Biology in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology (E3B).