Storing greater amounts of water in Brazil’s reservoirs could increase precipitation and river flow, alleviating the water and energy supply crisis in Brazil.
Seeds that would otherwise lie dormant will spring to life with the aid of a new chemical discovered by a UC Riverside-led team.
At a time when a drought is affecting the 40 million people who rely on the Colorado River system, Indiana University professor Travis O'Brien and a team of scientific colleagues are embarking on a monumental U.S. Department of Energy project to better predict the future of water availability in the West.
New research provides insights into how the position and intensity of the North Atlantic jet stream has changed during the past 1,250 years.
The ongoing climate crisis has already had drastic global impacts.
Dams poorly mimic the temperature patterns California streams require to support the state’s native salmon and trout — more than three-quarters of which risk extinction.
Mountain watersheds provide 60 to 90% of water resources worldwide, but there is still much that scientists don’t know about the physical processes and interactions that affect hydrology in these ecosystems. Now a team of U.S. Department of Energy scientists led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) aims to plug that gap, with an ambitious campaign to collect a vast array of measurements that will allow scientists to better understand the future of water in the West.
Expert Q&A: Do breakthrough cases mean we will soon need COVID boosters? The extremely contagious Delta variant continues to spread, prompting mask mandates, proof of vaccination, and other measures. Media invited to ask the experts about these and related topics.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced $11 million in funding for new research studying how critical ecosystems, such as forests, arid lands, and coastal environments, are impacted by extreme weather events, such as floods, droughts, and heat waves.
As concerns flare over record-low water levels at Lake Mead, a new UNLV study shows that COVID-19 pandemic stay-at-home orders — and a subsequent societal shift to remote work — may be exacerbating the problem.
The devastating 2012 - 2016 drought in California triggered widespread tree cover loss and die-offs of a variety of species in the region.
Research specialist Melissa Boyd and Regents' professor Michelle Mack from Northern Arizona University led the study, which demonstrated the long-term effects of climate change on this vegetation.
The study, published in the Journal of Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, analyzed 13 years of satellite and surface to better understand how aerosols impact cloud lifecycle and precipitation during the autumn months over northern Taiwan.
Irvine, Calif., June 21, 2021 – A shift is happening in Southern California, and this time it has nothing to do with earthquakes. According to a new study by scientists at the University of California, Irvine, climate change is altering the number of plants populating the region’s deserts and mountains. Using data from the Landsat satellite mission and focusing on an area of nearly 5,000 square miles surrounding Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, the research team found that between 1984 and 2017, vegetation cover in desert ecosystems decreased overall by about 35 percent, with mountains seeing a 13 percent vegetation decline.
The University of Adelaide, as part of an extensive collaboration with industry and the South Australian Government, will lead a new drought resilience hub in South Australia. Announced today, the hub will undertake research, development, extension, adoption and commercialisation activities to improve drought resilience and preparedness on SA farms.
A team of Australian and German researchers has discovered a novel pathway that plants can use to save water and improve their drought tolerance. The research published in Nature Communications shows that the molecule GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid), most commonly associated with relaxation in animals, can control the size of the pores on plant leaves to minimise water loss.
Water scarcity is often understood as a problem for regions experiencing drought, but a new study from Cornell and Tufts universities finds that not only can localized water shortages impact the global economy, but changes in global demand send positive and negative ripple effects to water basins across the globe.
An integrated model of climate and human activity suggests water scarcity can have economic ripple effects across the globe – sometimes amplifying economic harm, sometimes even providing benefits to distant regions. The model informs the management of regional water resources and economic adaptation
An international team of researchers including the University of Adelaide has demonstrated that climate change is responsible for the changes in the flow and water volume of rivers globally, with major implications for Australia.
Many climate models focus on scenarios decades into the future, making their outcomes seem unreliable and problematic for decision-making in the immediate future. In a proactive move, researchers are using short-term forecasts to stress the urgency of drought risk in the United States and inform policymakers' actions now.
Irvine, Calif., Jan. 18, 2021 — Future climate change will cause a regionally uneven shifting of the tropical rain belt – a narrow band of heavy precipitation near the equator – according to researchers at the University of California, Irvine and other institutions. This development may threaten food security for billions of people.
Michigan State University is leading a global research effort to offer the first worldwide view of how climate change could affect water availability and drought severity in the decades to come. By the late 21st century, global land area and population facing extreme droughts could more than double — increasing from 3% during 1976-2005 to 7%-8%, according to Yadu Pokhrel, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering in MSU’s College of Engineering, and lead author of the research published in Nature Climate Change.
Mega-droughts - droughts that last two decades or longer - are tipped to increase thanks to climate change, according to University of Queensland-led research.
Northern Arizona University researcher Xanthe Walker is the lead author on research published this week that found that the amount of carbon stored in soils was the biggest predictor of how much carbon would combust and that soil moisture also was significant in predicting carbon release.
New research from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) shows that by the years 2045-2049 future temperatures will have more of an effect on when cool-season crops, such as broccoli and lettuce, can be grown than on where, while for warm-season crops (cantaloupe, tomatoes, carrots) the impact will be greater for where they can be grown versus when.
Physical evidence found in caves in Laos helps tell a story about a connection between the end of the Green Sahara, when once heavily vegetated Northern Africa became a hyper-arid landscape, and a previously unknown megadrought that crippled Southeast Asia 4,000 to 5,000 years ago.
While many models suggest that climate change will prompt a substantial number of people to leave their homes, not all research so clearly finds this is the case. Investigating cases where computer models seemed to indicate only limited impacts of climate change on people leaving rural areas, a team of researchers now suggest that the models may reveal a more nuanced circular migration pattern in areas stricken by climate change impacts.
With increasing drought conditions in the Texas High Plains, researchers test sorghum and pearl millet as alternatives to corn
Despite devastating impacts of drought on human and natural systems, the reasons why long-term regional drying occurs remain poorly understood. Research led by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists have identified two signatures or “fingerprints” that explain why arid conditions are spreading worldwide, and why the Western United States has tended towards drought conditions since the 1980s while the African Sahel has recovered from its prolonged drought. The research appears in the July 6 edition of Nature Climate Change.
Some governments are counting on planted forests as offsets for greenhouse gas emissions—a sort of climate investment. But as with any investment, it’s important to understand the risks. If a forest goes bust, researchers say, much of that stored carbon could go up in smoke. Forests can be best deployed in the fight against climate change with a proper understanding of the risks to that forest that climate change itself imposes.
Plant biologists have developed a nanosensor that monitors mechanisms related to stress and drought. The new biosensor allows researchers to analyze changes in real time involving specific kinases, which are known to be activated in response to drought conditions.
New research has found that El Niño events are often associated with droughts in some of the world’s more vulnerable tropical regions. Associated with warmer than average ocean temperatures in the eastern Pacific, El Niños can in turn influence global weather patterns and tropical precipitation, and these changes can lead to massive plant die-offs if other extreme factors are also at play.
Researchers have found strong evidence that the risk for armed conflict is higher after a climate-related disaster, but only in vulnerable countries.
Hotter and drier El Niño events are having an alarming effect on biodiversity in the Amazon Rainforest and further add to a disturbing global insect collapse, scientists show.
New research from the University of Notre Dame is shedding light on the unexpected effects climate change could have on regional instability and violent conflict.
Researchers have new insight into plant survival after identifying hormones and proteins that interact to regulate root emergence. The findings may lead to the ability to control when and how many additional roots a plant can form – a key weapon in battling dry conditions caused by climate change.
A combination of climate change, extreme weather and pressure from local human activity is causing a collapse in global biodiversity and ecosystems across the tropics, new research shows.
Severe droughts happened simultaneously in the regions that supply water to Southern California almost six times per century on average since 1500, according to new University of Arizona-led research.
To understand how the relentless heat, blazing wild fires, and bone-dry conditions have reached such extremes, scientists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) are looking to the ocean.
Scientists predict a warming Earth will cause more droughts that are more severe in the grasslands of the central United States. This research found that soil drying affects the microbial community in several ways.
The last remaining tropical glaciers between the Himalayas and the Andes will disappear in the next decade – and possibly sooner – due to climate change, a new study has found. The glaciers in Papua, Indonesia, are “the canaries in the coal mine” for other mountaintop glaciers around the world, one of the senior authors of the paper said.
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