Highlights

Since 1989, the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) has submitted annual reports to Congress called Our Changing Planet. The reports describe the status of USGCRP research activities, provide progress updates, and document recent accomplishments.

In particular, Our Changing Planet highlights progress and accomplishments in interagency activities. These highlights represent the broad spectrum of USGCRP activities that extend from Earth system observations, modeling, and fundamental research through synthesis and assessment, decision support, education, and public engagement.

A researcher launches a radiosonde instrument attached to a weather balloon to capture detailed atmospheric data.

The Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica is the stormiest place on Earth, marked by heavy cloud cover that helps determine how much of the sun’s energy reaches Earth’s surface. Due in part to the scarcity of field data from the region, current climate models have difficulty reproducing the behavior of clouds over the Southern Ocean, which in turn affects how well they can simulate current and future climate. Motivated by these data limitations, an international multi-agency effort collected atmospheric and oceanographic data via ship-, aircraft-, and island-based instrumentation in a...

Forecasts of ocean surface current velocity in the Pacific Ocean off of Baja California generated in part using in-situ observations from NOAA’s Tropical Atmosphere Ocean (TAO)

Upgrades to an observing network in the equatorial Pacific Ocean support valuable forecasts of global shifts in climate and extreme weather.

The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a natural climate phenomenon driven in part by the variability of ocean surface temperatures, atmospheric pressure, and trade winds in the tropical Pacific Ocean. ENSO events, occurring every two to seven years on average, cause widespread shifts in precipitation patterns and weather and climate

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Much of the precipitation along the U.S. West Coast is delivered by phenomena known as “atmospheric rivers”—narrow bands of moist air that may extend for thousands of miles across regions outside of the tropics, and play a critical role in regional water supply and storm activity. Atmospheric-river events play a beneficial role in building up Western water supply and snowpack but are also the source of a large majority of floods in the region. Many uncertainties about key processes that affect storm development...

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Highlights

Unprecedented observations in the Southern Ocean help improve global climate models

Strengthening critical observations of the tropical ocean and atmosphere

Understanding Atmospheric Rivers and West Coast Precipitation