Record-setting fires in the western US over the last decade caused severe air pollution, loss of human life, and property damage. Enhanced drought and increased biomass in a warmer climate may fuel larger and more frequent wildfires in the coming decades. Applying an empirical statistical model to fires projected by Earth system models…

In the tropical Pacific, year-to-year changes in chlorophyll, a proxy for the phytoplankton base of ocean food webs, is dominated by the El Niño–Southern Oscillation. El Niño, triggered by westerly wind anomalies and subsequent redistributions of upper ocean heat content, can sharply reduce the regional supply of nutrients, limiting…

AOS Faculty Member Laure Resplandy, assistant professor of geosciences and the High Meadows Environmental Institute, co-led a huge international effort that used modeling and observations to determine the role of waterways – streams, rivers, estuaries, mangrove forests, and more – in both storing and transporting carbon.

Coastal oceans host diverse ecosystems and serve as important habitats for marine fish species. Over the past century, anthropogenic activities have resulted in substantial climatic and land use changes that stress coastal environments, often leading to eutrophication, harmful algal blooms, and deoxygenation. Rivers are a primary source of…

In Western North America, 30% of the annual precipitation is determined by atmospheric rivers (ARs) that occur during less than 15% of the winter season. ARs are beneficial to water supply but can also produce extreme precipitation hazards when making landfall. Consequently, ARs exert significant socioeconomic impacts on this region. The…

Eight members of Princeton’s science and engineering faculty recently took part in a Community of Practice focused on adding diverse voices to course materials and inviting guest speakers to speak to their students, among them AOS Faculty Member Laure Resplandy, an assistant…

SVT Documentary: Portrait of Nobel Laureate Suki Manabe (The documentary is in both English and Swedish.)

Videography: Johan Bergendorff, SVT

Watch the 2021 Nobel Prize Lectures in Physics - Suki Manabe

There is intense public and scientific interest in weather and climate extremes. Understanding to what degree these phenomena are predictable has great practical value to society. Midlatitude baroclinic waves drive extratropical weather and climate extremes, but the predictability of these waves beyond 2 weeks has long been deemed low.

In the nineteen-sixties, AOS Senior Meteorologist Syukuro (Suki) Manabe drew a graph that foretold our world today—and what’s to come.

Read more about Nobel Laureate Suki Manabe in The New Yorker