The U.S. Department of Agriculture today released its new Plant Hardiness Zone Map, the national standard by which gardeners can determine which plants are most likely to survive the coldest winter temperatures at a certain ...
Plants & Animals
Nov 15, 2023
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A new study led by the University of Oxford has overturned the view that natural rock weathering acts as a CO2 sink, indicating instead that this can also act as a large CO2 source, rivaling that of volcanoes. The results, ...
Earth Sciences
Oct 4, 2023
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2031
Once trusted faces on the news, meteorologists now brave threats, insults and slander online from conspiracy theorists and climate change deniers who accuse them of faking or even fixing the weather.
Environment
May 13, 2023
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842
A controversial research project in Norway on whales' hearing was suspended after a whale drowned, researchers said on Wednesday, as activists slammed the "cruel and pointless" experiments.
Ecology
Jun 7, 2023
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Population ecologist William Rees, with the University of British Columbia's School of Community and Regional Planning, is reminding denizens of Earth that the planet can only support so many people. In his paper published ...
Located at the intersection of South, Central, and East Asia, the massive Tibetan Plateau is often considered to be Earth's "third pole." A land of large glaciers, permafrost, and heavy snow, the plateau feeds a vast network ...
Environment
Aug 25, 2023
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427
In a little more than five years—sometime in early 2029—the world will likely be unable to stay below the internationally agreed temperature limit for global warming if it continues to burn fossil fuels at its current ...
Environment
Nov 4, 2023
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574
Around the world, rainforests are becoming savanna or farmland, savanna is drying out and turning into desert, and icy tundra is thawing. Indeed, scientific studies have now recorded "regime shifts" like these in more than ...
Environment
Jun 25, 2023
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1592
Dozens of Alaska's most remote streams and rivers are turning from a crystal clear blue into a cloudy orange, and the staining could be the result of minerals exposed by thawing permafrost, finds new research in Communications ...
Earth Sciences
May 20, 2024
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481
Jupiter has some of the most conspicuous atmospheric features in our solar system. The planet's Great Red Spot, large enough to envelop Earth, is nearly as well known as some of the various rivers and mountains on the planet ...
Astronomy
Oct 19, 2023
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Weather is a set of all the phenomena occurring in a given atmosphere at a given time. Weather phenomena lie in the troposphere. Weather refers, generally, to day-to-day temperature and precipitation activity, whereas climate is the term for the average atmospheric conditions over longer periods of time. When used without qualification, "weather" is understood to be the weather of Earth.
Weather occurs due to density (temperature and moisture) differences between one place and another. These differences can occur due to the sun angle at any particular spot, which varies by latitude from the tropics. The strong temperature contrast between polar and tropical air gives rise to the jet stream. Weather systems in the mid-latitudes, such as extratropical cyclones, are caused by instabilities of the jet stream flow. Because the Earth's axis is tilted relative to its orbital plane, sunlight is incident at different angles at different times of the year. On Earth's surface, temperatures usually range ±40 °C (100 °F to −40 °F) annually. Over thousands to hundreds of thousands of years, changes in Earth's orbit affect the amount and distribution of solar energy received by the Earth and influence long-term climate
Surface temperature differences in turn cause pressure differences. Higher altitudes are cooler than lower altitudes due to differences in compressional heating. Weather forecasting is the application of science and technology to predict the state of the atmosphere for a future time and a given location. The atmosphere is a chaotic system, so small changes to one part of the system can grow to have large effects on the system as a whole. Human attempts to control the weather have occurred throughout human history, and there is evidence that human activity such as agriculture and industry has inadvertently modified weather patterns.
Studying how the weather works on other planets has been helpful in understanding how weather works on Earth. A famous landmark in the Solar System, Jupiter's Great Red Spot, is an anticyclonic storm known to have existed for at least 300 years. However, weather is not limited to planetary bodies. A star's corona is constantly being lost to space, creating what is essentially a very thin atmosphere throughout the Solar System. The movement of mass ejected from the Sun is known as the solar wind.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
