Scientists from the University of Oregon and their partners have mapped the amount of water stored beneath volcanic rocks at the crest of the central Oregon Cascades and found an aquifer many times larger than previously estimated — at least 81 cubic kilometers. 

The finding has implications for the way scientists and policymakers think about water in the region — an increasingly urgent issue across the Western United States as climate change reduces snowpack, intensifies drought and strains limited resources. 

A research team led by Professor Ming Cai from Florida State University, in collaboration with researchers from Sun Yat-sen University, Peking University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, recently published a groundbreaking paper in National Science Review. Titled “Principles-Based Adept Predictions of Global Warming from Climate Mean States”, the study introduces a novel framework that accurately predicts the magnitude and spatial pattern of global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions, without relying on complex climate models or statistical analysis. For the first time, this study confirms that observed global warming is driven by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, independently of these conventional approaches.

The year 2024 is on-track to be the hottest on record, and with it came some of the most challenging extreme weather conditions the modern world has witnessed.

A team led by researchers at the University of Tokyo have created a dataset of the whole atmosphere, enabling new research to be conducted on previously difficult-to-study regions. Using a new data-assimilation system called JAGUAR-DAS, which combines numerical modeling with observational data, the team created a nearly 20-yearlong set of data spanning multiple levels of the atmosphere from ground level up to the lower edges of space. Being able to study the interactions of these layers vertically and around the globe could improve climate modeling and seasonal weather forecasting. There is also potential for interdisciplinary research between atmospheric scientists and space scientists, to investigate the interplay between space and our atmosphere and how it affects us on Earth.