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...

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Unprecedented observations in the Southern Ocean help improve global climate models