Weather

Take every stretch of open ocean outside the polar seas, average the surface temperature across all of it, and the number you get has a season of its own. It is not the season most people live in. It…

Think of the jet stream as a motorway for weather. Most days the traffic moves briskly west to east, and one system gives way to the next before either can do much damage. But every so often the flow…

The physics of climate change runs on decades and centuries. Politics runs on the last hot summer. A new modeling study asks what happens when you wire the two together and let the short clock start…

Most of the plastic that enters the ocean does not stay at sea. It comes back to land, washing onto beaches, piling up in mangroves, fouling the same coastlines it drifted away from. The hard…

The UK Met Office published a long-range forecast on Aug. 21 showing central tropical Pacific sea-surface temperatures rising more than 3 °C in the coming months, a signal its head of long-range…

Averages are reassuring, and that is exactly the problem. When people talk about rain getting heavier in a warming world, the mental image is usually a whole distribution nudging up a notch:…

In 2010, a severe drought gripped the Amazon, one of a run of exceptional dry spells this century that have tested the world's largest rainforest. Droughts like that are grim to live through and, for…

A heatwave is almost always reduced to a thermometer reading: a record broken, a threshold crossed, a number in the headline. But no single figure captures what a heatwave actually is: a whole…

For a day and a half in February 2022, Storm Eunice tore across the British Isles, the Low Countries and northern Germany, driving a red weather warning, shuttering rail networks and leaving well…

Ask how often a river floods catastrophically and the standard answer comes wrapped in a number: the 100-year flood, an event so severe it strikes, on average, once a century. It is the figure…

By the end of 29 October 2024, a rain gauge in the small town of Turís, inland from Valencia, had recorded something almost no one in Europe had seen: 771 millimetres of rain in twenty-four hours.…

For two decades, the story of Europe's air has been one of slow, hard-won improvement. Cleaner engines, tighter industrial rules, and the retreat of coal have pulled soot and sulphur down year after…