The arrangement of a city’s streets and buildings plays a crucial role in the local urban heat island effect, which causes cities to be hotter than their surroundings, researchers have found. The new finding could provide city planners and officials with new ways to influence those effects.

The interplay between surface-water salinity and climate change in Central New York is the subject of a recent paper by researchers in Syracuse University’s College of Arts and Sciences.

The nights in the German federal states („Bundesländer“) has been getting brighter and brighter – but not everywhere at the same rate and with one peculiar exemption: light emissions from Thuringia decreased between 2012 and 2017. This is the result of a recent study by scientists Chris Kyba and Theres Küster from the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences together with Helga Kuechly from “Luftbild – Umwelt – Planung, Potsdam”. Kyba and colleagues published the study in the International Journal of Sustainable Lighting IJSL. This week, they updated the maps by including the 2017 data from a satellite-born instrument.

Soil pathogen testing – critical to farming, but painstakingly slow and expensive – will soon be done accurately, quickly, inexpensively and onsite, thanks to research that Washington State University scientists are sharing.

Those long, intense plumes of moisture in the sky known as atmospheric rivers are a vital water source to communities along the U.S. West Coast. In their absence, desiccating droughts can develop. But in their presence, they can cause extreme rain and floods that can disrupt travel, cause landslides, and trigger infrastructure failures.

Drier summers and a decline in average snowpack over the past 40 years have severely hampered the establishment of two foundational tree species in subalpine regions of Colorado’s Front Range, suggesting that climate warming is already taking a toll on forest health in some areas of the southern Rocky Mountains.

Carbon monoxide can improve the effectiveness of antibiotics, making bacteria more sensitive to antibiotic medication, according to a study led by Georgia State University.

Environmental scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have led an international collaboration to improve satellite observations of tropical forests.

The Silk Road pattern in meteorology, is a wave-like teleconnection pattern in summer propagating eastward under the wave-guidance of the upper-tropospheric Asian westerly jet stream. It shows up as alternate southerly and northerly anomalies (or cyclonic and anticyclonic circulation anomalies) along the jet, and is the leading mode of the interannual variability of upper-tropospheric meridional winds. It is interesting that this meteorological teleconnection pattern covers most domains along the ancient Silk Road, and exerts significant influences on climatic anomalies over a broad area of the Eurasian continent.

Predicting the weather a few days in advance is a complex undertaking. But what about the weather 3 to 4 weeks from now? Producing that kind of forecast is a daunting challenge  — but is crucial for a slew of communities. These future forecasts, called sub-seasonal predictions, can help energy companies determine how much power to produce to meet demands for upcoming months; they assist water resource managers controlling reservoir levels ahead of upcoming water use; they even help farmers understand which crops to plant in the face of potential dry weather.