Explore the Climate section of The Pulse for in-depth coverage of global warming, environmental change and climate solutions.
At an extreme height over the Pacific Ocean, a number of satellite systems recorded Sinlaku gravity waves unlike any that had existed. And that’s where what…
Picture a country the size of Alaska, and imagine more than four fifths of it undergoing surface melting in the space of a week. That is…
Stand at any beach and the ocean looks permanent, almost stubborn, a vast bowl of water that rises and falls only when ice melts or freezes.…
Twenty miles of marsh, barely a blip on most maps, is the only natural buffer standing between Lake Pontchartrain and the open Gulf of Mexico. Locals…
Picture a dry, cloudless October morning in Fort Lauderdale. No storm, no rain, no wind worth mentioning. And yet, water is rising through the drains, spilling…
Every summer, the same argument starts somewhere in America. One person inches the thermostat down toward 68 degrees, another nudges it back up. But buried inside…
Superniño global population collapse wasn’t how these numbers were first understood. Large areas of the earth’s surface across three different continents lost their populations over a…
Picture the entire surface of our planet as a single living thermometer, every ocean, forest, glacier and cornfield averaged into one number. For all of recorded…
There is a good chance you already own one. It trails from a shelf or hangs in a corner, heart shaped leaves spilling downward, surviving weeks…
On a July afternoon in 2023, a NOAA buoy anchored off the Florida Keys recorded something that stopped scientists cold: water temperature at 101.1 degrees Fahrenheit, in…
Most mornings along the California coast, it arrives the same way it always has: a grey wall sliding in off the Pacific just before sunrise, swallowing…
Step outside on a summer morning and look up. You see fluffy white clouds drifting past, and your brain files the scene under completely ordinary. You…
In the northern Alaska village of Point Lay, the houses are doing something nobody expected. They are not toppling in storms or washing away in floods.…
Macquarie Island’s 75-year climate record suggests Southern Ocean storms are getting far wetter — and heat loss may exceed what models captured. Macquarie Island is barely…
There has been a significant amount of research done regarding the effects of climate change and its impact on crops such as rice. Rice is an…
In the summer of 1948, anyone gazing up over the remote mountains of central Idaho might have seen something they could never quite explain. A small…
Looking at the Earth from space, the Northern Hemisphere is mostly bright land. The southern half is predominantly dark ocean. But both halves reflect the same…
Four years after the Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fire tore through 341,471 acres of northern New Mexico, the burn scar still stretches for miles — a vast…
On a 41-acre hillside near Gortin in Omagh, Rosemary Mulholland walks among thousands of young native trees — oaks, rowans, alders — each one barely visible…
When the Hunga Tonga volcano exploded on January 15, 2022, it did something no eruption had done before in the satellite record: it drove roughly 150…
Peque scratches her head on a wooden branch inside a wired enclosure at a rescue center in Nosara, Costa Rica — small, quiet, and alive, though…
The 2026 Atlantic hurricane season officially opened June 1, and for the first time in years, forecasters are predicting a quieter stretch ahead. NOAA puts the…
A NOAA hurricane hunter is flying just 1,000 feet above Houston — not tracking a storm, but scanning the invisible chemistry of the city’s air. Staged…
The shrimp boats still leave before dawn from the docks south of New Orleans, and the ice houses still hum along the bayous where fishing families…
The 2025 Atlantic hurricane season didn’t break records on paper. Thirteen named storms placed it well within historical norms. But storm counts don’t measure grief —…
Orville Williams has grown wheat on his 2,600-acre farm in Montezuma, Kansas, every year since he was a teenager. At 76, he has outlasted droughts, recessions,…
For the last half-century, we have rated hurricanes by an outdated, static, 5-tiered standard. Does this old framework give us fair warning of today’s record-breaking, super-charged…
Northern Ireland’s vanishing rainforest is being restored — 30,000 trees at a time. Northern Ireland has its own rainforest. Not the tropical kind — ancient, temperate,…
Beyond the familiar chaos of thunder and lightning lies a secret meteorological event. It’s something that people have witnessed to speak of, but until now, has…
Mid-May is supposed to feel far from peak fire danger in California. This year, it doesn’t. Three major fires are already burning across Southern California, and…
March 2026 is running about six degrees above normal in Houston — a gap wide enough to make local meteorologists uneasy before summer has even arrived.…
Last summer, the wild blueberry fields at Crystal Spring Farm near Brunswick, Maine, turned red too soon. The leaves were changing color prematurely — a sign,…
Mid-May in Seattle, and the heat wave is already a memory. Drizzle returned overnight, temperatures slipped below normal, and satellite imagery shows a thick mat of…
Chainsaw damage across the Brazilian Amazon just fell to its lowest level in eight years — a number that, on its own, reads like a conservation…
For over a century, Seattle City Light has proudly called itself America’s first carbon-neutral utility — powered by three dams on the Skagit River, one of…
Extreme melt events on Greenland’s ice sheet were once rare enough to stand out in the climate record. Now they’re becoming the norm. Since 1990, meltwater…
On a spring morning across western Washington, thick fog settled into the river valleys and spread across the lowlands — the kind of gray, murky blanket…
The Gulf of Mexico has never warmed quite like the rest of the world’s oceans — but since 2012, the gap has grown impossible to ignore.…
Harvey drowned Houston under 60 inches of rain. Florence stalled over the Carolinas for days. Helene killed hundreds of people miles from any coastline. For years,…
On a Tuesday afternoon in late April, storm chasers and National Weather Service offices spanning Oklahoma, Missouri, and Arkansas are tracking a cluster of supercells already…
On Tuesday afternoon, the Storm Prediction Center issued an urgent severe thunderstorm watch covering portions of southwest Illinois, western Kentucky, and eastern Missouri — a stretch…
Every March, Arctic sea ice completes its winter expansion and reaches its annual peak before the spring melt begins. This year, that pattern didn’t hold. Satellite…
At the Kure oyster festival, the longest lines stretch in front of the shellfish stalls, where chefs shuffle mottled bivalves across hot griddles. The atmosphere is…
Our oceans are getting hotter and hotter. The most devastating impact of global warming has been on our oceans. The sea absorbs the vast majority of…
Science may have found an answer to reduce global warming. Over the past three decades, we have seen the climate crisis develop from a concern for…
The Earth is far warmer than we ever knew. And it’s only getting hotter by the year. Climate change has become the issue of our time,…
Beneath the world’s tropical wetlands lies a carbon archive built over thousands of years — peat deposits so vast they store more carbon than all the…
Today will be one of the wettest in recent memory. The NOAA gives daily warnings of any potentially dangerous weather conditions for us to consider. With…
Corpus Christi is one of the nation’s busiest commercial ports, home to half a million people and a sprawling network of fuel refineries and petrochemical plants.…
Tornado season is getting closer by the day. The annual warnings from the government over the upcoming tornado season are becoming as common as an apple…
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