National Center for Atmospheric Research News

California Girds For Most Dangerous Fire Weather of Year

SAN FRANCISCO — California, which has endured its worst wildfire season in history, is bracing for the most dangerous winds of the year, a forecast that prompted the largest utility to announce plans to cut power Sunday to nearly 1 …

Hurricane Laura and the California Fires Are Part of the Same Crisis

As Hurricane Laura pounded the U.S. Gulf Coast with nearly 150 mile-per-hour winds, causing water levels to rise almost 10 feet above normal in the wee hours of the morning, wildfires in California were still raging across more than a …

Climate Models Are Running Red Hot, and Scientists Don’t Know Why

There are dozens of climate models, and for decades they’ve agreed on what it would take to heat the planet by about 3° Celsius. It’s an outcome that would be disastrous—flooded cities, agricultural failures, deadly heat—but there’s been a grim …

Wall Street Embraces Weather Risk in New Era of Storms, Drought

Every uptick in wind speed along the Gulf of Mexico shoreline is of enormous interest to Mike Eilts. Eilts, senior vice president for weather at DTN, a Minnesota-based analytics firm, knows that an unexpected cold front in Louisiana, nudged southward …