Multi-source observations improve thunderstorm gust identification

The global water cycle is becoming increasingly unbalanced. Extreme droughts and floods are the result. This is shown in this year's report by the World Meteorological Organization on the state of global water resources, "State of Global Water Resources 2025," which was published today. "The total volume of water stored on the continents is steadily decreasing," said Professor Robert Reinecke of the Department of Geography at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, who has played a key role in compiling the report, which has been published annually since 2022, from the very beginning.

Plasma bubbles in the ionosphere over equatorial and low-latitude regions are a common nighttime plasma density depletion structure that can cause severe scintillation interference on high-frequency communications, making them an important target of space weather monitoring. Traditional detection methods rely on statistical thresholds derived from temporal fluctuations in ion density; however, plasma bubbles exhibit significant variability in spatiotemporal scales (ranging from kilometers to hundreds of kilometers), and their occurrence frequency is strongly modulated by solar activity and seasonal factors. Consequently, fixed-threshold methods struggle to accommodate this diversity, with miss rates reaching up to 40% during periods of low solar activity. Although deep learning has demonstrated powerful capabilities in automatically extracting and recognizing complex waveform features in fields such as medical image segmentation and signal peak detection, its systematic application to ionospheric plasma bubble detection—and thus addressing the adaptability deficiencies of traditional threshold methods—remains underexplored.

A 178-year-old mystery surrounding one of the earliest recorded examples of space weather affecting technology has been solved by an international team led by Lancaster University.

 

The first practical electric telegraph networks were deployed during the 1840s, and as solar activity increased during the following years, Victorian telegraph operators began to experience unexplained electrical effects caused by geomagnetic disturbances.

Professor Jim Wild from Lancaster University with scientists from the British Geological Survey, Natural Resources Canada, Baylor University, RMIT University, and STFC RAL Space, re-examined a widely cited account of a train delay in Exeter that was reportedly caused by geomagnetic disturbance from the sun interfering with railway’s telegraph systems.

The event has previously been cited as potentially the earliest recorded example of space weather affecting human technology but the team’s research published in the American Geophysical Union journal Space Weather contradicts this assumption.

 

A latest study published in National Science Review has resolved inconsistencies in the responses of Western Pacific Subtropical High (WPSH) to greenhouse warming that arise from earlier definitions. The study reports a robust increase in WPSH’s area and intensity, its northwestward expansion, as well as in occurrence of stronger, longer-lasting record-breaking WPSH events under the past and future climate change scenario. These changes imply increasing risk exposure to monsoon rainfall extremes and heatwaves beyond historical experience for human society and communities.

SAN ANTONIO — September 15, 2026 — Southwest Research Institute hardware will soon enter orbit around Mercury as part of the BepiColombo mission that includes two spacecraft — the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA) Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO). SwRI led the design and fabrication of NASA’s Strofio, an instrument aboard MPO.

Why do some heatwaves last through the night in the Yangtze River Basin?

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology and the Institut de Biologie Structurale have determined the structure and molecular characteristics of a remarkably heat-stable enzyme which turns nitrogen gas into ammonia. Their findings, published in Nature Communications, highlight new insights on how nature breaks the exceptionally strong N₂ triple bond to generate this important fertiliser and biofuel.