Articles

Climate change impacts all of us in various ways. Changes in soil moisture have a pronounced effect on agricultural production, which in turn impacts the food we grow to eat. Changes in precipitation patterns are leading to increases in drought in certain regions and causing flooding in others. All of these impacts are influenced by interactions among processes within the Earth system involving the atmosphere, ocean, land, ice, and life. These natural interactions, combined with human influences such as the release of greenhouse gases, serve to drive the climate system resulting in distinct

Climate researchers around the world are taking advantage of NASA satellite observations to help inform, improve, and enhance climate models. NASA data helps to predict the future of Earth's climate and improve the predictive capability of models. This gives decision-makers the tools they need to make better decisions on how we live, including understand the changing impacts of hurricanes and improving predictions of fire seasons. But how exactly does NASA data support climate modeling activities, and how does the data improve these models? We’re here to explain the inner workings of how NASA

In the North Atlantic, the tropical system known as Henri reached hurricane status on Saturday, August 21, 2021. At the time, it was approaching a landfall in New England. Between Friday and Sunday, Henri was observed three times by the Dual-frequency Precipitation Radar (DPR) on the core satellite of NASA's Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission. The GPM satellite's first two flyovers of Henri occurred just 10 hours apart and revealed a remarkably unchanging structure that was being impacted by wind shear. A third overflight occurred a day later, when wind shear had abated and Henri

Tropical Storm Fred, the 6th named storm of the 2021 Atlantic hurricane season, began as a westward moving disturbance in the central Atlantic east of the Lesser Antilles. The system passed through the southern Leeward Islands during the early morning hours of August 10 but still lacked a well-defined center of circulation. Despite significant thunderstorm activity within the system, it wasn’t until late that evening, when the system was passing just south of Puerto Rico, that the National Hurricane Center (NHC) identified a well-defined circulation and upgraded the system to Tropical Storm

During July 17 to 28, 2021, several storm systems brought heavy rain to parts of China and surrounding countries, while a nine-month-long drought persists in an adjacent part of China. NASA's multi-satellite precipitation algorithm has been monitoring this rainfall in near real-time, and the estimates are distributed to weather-forecasting agencies and disaster-monitoring organizations. This algorithm is called IMERG , the Integrated Multi-satellitE Retrievals for GPM. GPM is the NASA / JAXA Global Precipitation Measurement mission , which launched its Core Observatory satellite in 2014. Two