A better method for predicting the number of hurricanes in an upcoming season has been developed by atmospheric scientists. The team’s new model improves the accuracy of seasonal hurricane forecasts for the North Atlantic and the Gulf of mexico by 23 percent.

Researchers have developed a modeling tool to help local communities better understand their vulnerabilities to large storms stoked by climate change.

Soil organic matter, long thought to be a semi-permanent storehouse for ancient carbon, may be much more vulnerable to climate change than previously thought. Scientists have found that the common root secretion, oxalic acid, can promote soil carbon loss by an unconventional mechanism — freeing organic compounds from protective associations with minerals.

The ocean is a large reservoir of dissolved organic molecules, and many of these molecules are stable against microbial utilization for hundreds to thousands of years. They contain a similar amount of carbon as compared to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Researchers found answers to questions about the origin of these persistent molecules in a recent study.

The volcanologist Stephen Self, an expert on super-eruptions, was the first modern-day scientist to visit Tambora in Indonesia, the site of the largest volcanic eruption in 1,000 years. On the 200th anniversary of its eruption in 1815, Self and others warn of the ever-present dangers of volcanoes like Tambora. Globally dispersed clouds of sulfate aerosols could lead to cooling, crop failures and famine, as happened in the ‘year without a summer’ of 1816.

Researchers have detected a human fingerprint deep in the Borneo rainforest in southeast asia. Cold winds blowing from the north carry industrial pollutants from East Asia to the equator, with implications for air quality in the region. Once there, the pollutants can travel higher into the atmosphere and impact the ozone layer.

European, Russian and Chinese scientific leaders and researchers in climate issues gathered recently in Helsinki, Finland for a conference on the Pan-Eurasian Experiment (PEEX). “Global warming and other comparable ecosystem changes have dramatic effects in the Arctic and the Boreal regions. These are the regions which we have very little information on”, say experts. PEEX is a multi-disciplinary, multi-decadal research program for the Northern and the Arctic areas. It mostly involves basic research in the natural sciences, but is also expected to produce concrete and technical solutions for environmental problems.

As the five-year anniversary of the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig approaches, a new report looks at how twenty species of wildlife are faring in the aftermath of the disaster.

Accurately anticipating an approaching typhoon’s destructive force makes all the difference in advance preparations and as a consequence, the cost in lives. But over the decades, climate scientists have not made the same headway in this regard as they have in predicting a typhoon’s trajectory. Researchers have found that an aspect of a typhoon being ignored by current forecasting models plays a significant role in determining the level of havoc it will wreak upon landfall.

The adverse health effects caused by fine particles have been known for some time. In addition, ultrafine particles appear to play a significant role in cardiac function — even if an individual is exposed to these for only a few minutes, scientists have now demonstrated.