Severe Weather

A daredevil seabird species has learnt to harness the insane power of hurricanes, seeking out storms over the ocean to 'ride' them for their own benefit. It's the first time this behavior has been observed, and now has scientists wondering if it's far more widespread in the avian world.

Climate change will trigger stronger storms more often, and the threat may not be properly communicated. Now, scientists at Berkeley Lab suggest there’s room for a Category 6 on the scale – with five storms in the past decade reaching that strength.

Independent analyses by NASA, NOAA, WMO, Copernicus and the UK Met Office have all confirmed that 2023 was officially the hottest year on record. A slew of other records were also broken amidst a string of severe weather events across the globe.

Google has put AI to work as a weatherman, and shown that in just one minute on a single machine, it can make accurate predictions up to 10 days in advance, a task that normally takes a room full of supercomputers hours to achieve.

Coming as no surprise to the millions who sweltered through a Northern Hemisphere summer, the season that has just passed was Earth’s hottest since records began in 1880. The steamy baton is expected to now be passed on to the Southern Hemisphere.

Scientists have demonstrated a more advanced lightning rod than a humble metal stick. Beaming a high-powered laser into the sky was shown to deflect lightning bolts, enabling laser lightning rods that protect a wider area from dangerous strikes.

There are few more spectacular demonstrations of nature's power than a thunderstorm. The World Meteorological Association (WMO) has now confirmed two new records for the biggest lightning bolts in recorded history, measured by duration and distance.

The western United States has been suffering drought since 2000. A new study has examined extreme droughts in the region dating back 1,200 years, and found that the current conditions have the makings of a “megadrought” that could last decades.

The Statement on the State of the Global Climate in 2019 report confirms that last year was another record-breaker, continuing a worrying trend that indicates we’re drifting further off-track from meeting the targets of the 2015 Paris Agreement.

Astronomers may have found a world where it rains iron. The exoplanet is exposed to thousands of times the radiation that the Earth receives from the Sun, rendering the surface hot enough to vaporize metals that later fall as rain.

Australia is currently in one of the worst bushfires on record, and it’s not hard to see why. The Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) has released a climate statement for 2019, and found that last year was the hottest and driest on record for the continent.

While lightning strikes are generally considered to be a summer phenomenon, the rare and powerful superbolt form doesn't follow suit.