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.

Methane emitted from thawing permafrost below an Arctic thermokarst lake is trapped in bubbles of many different sizes and shapes as the ice grows during the winter.

Long-frozen northern soils known as permafrost contain one of the world’s largest stores of organic carbon. This reservoir is stable while soils are frozen, but as permafrost thaws, decomposition of biomass by microbes produces the heat-trapping gases carbon dioxide and methane, returning soil carbon to the atmosphere where it contributes to climate change. Permafrost carbon stores are expected to be increasingly vulnerable to decomposition as the climate continues to change, leading to a feedback cycle of further warming and permafrost thaw.^[1]...

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...

The ability to archive and share datasets generated by field, experimental, and modeling activities is a critical component of Earth system and global change research. Several recent interagency efforts aim to support advances in global change data access, synthesis, and use.

DOE recently launched the Environmental Systems Science Data Infrastructure for a Virtual Ecosystem (ESS-DIVE), a publicly accessible archive of Earth and environmental science data generated by DOE-supported ecosystems research...

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Highlights

Scientists investigate the effects of carbon emissions from thawing permafrost soils

Unprecedented observations in the Southern Ocean help improve global climate models

New data infrastructure helps build a virtual ecosystem of Earth science information