Wildfires affect communities throughout the United States each year, threatening lives, property and infrastructure, and ecosystems. 1 Understanding the climatic conditions that influence wildfire patterns can improve our ability to predict the occurrence and severity of future wildfires, and ultimately support the development of effective adaptation strategies. In response to this need, multiple programs within the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the Department of the Interior’s Climate Adaptation Science Centers (CASC) are collaborating with the USDA Forest Service (USDA-FS) and other...

U.S. coastal communities are increasingly vulnerable to sea level rise, tidal flooding, higher storm surge, coastal erosion, and other climate-related impacts. 1 To help communities in southern California plan for rising water levels, a NASA DEVELOP team collaborated with the U.S. Geological Survey’s (USGS) Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center, in partnership with the California Coastal Commission, to create detailed projections of flooding from sea level rise and coastal storms along the central and southern California coastline that can inform planning to reduce climate-related risks to...

Hurricane Florence struck the Carolinas on September 14, 2018, causing widespread flooding and damage. In the aftermath of the storm, NASA deployed airborne radar to map floodwaters threatening the region , supplying federal, state, and local agencies with information critical to disaster response efforts. Airborne radar is able to “see” through cloud cover to image the ground below during day and night and can map flooding occurring under vegetation, which is especially valuable in heavily vegetated areas such as the Carolinas. Scientists rapidly mapped the extent and depth of flooding...

USGCRP agencies and interagency groups played a leading role in the development of a Belmont Forum international Collaborative Research Action (CRA) launched in April 2019, focused on issues at the intersection of climate, environment, and human health. In addition to an international scoping workshop organized by the Interagency Crosscutting Group on Climate Change and Human Health (CCHHG) and International Activities Interagency Working Group (IAIWG) in April 2018, USGCRP member agencies (including NIH, NOAA, and NSF) participated in a year-long, international drafting process for a final...

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. ESS-DIVE enables the user community to easily access the datasets underlying research results...

Globally, average sea level has risen over the past several decades as ocean waters have warmed. While the ocean as a whole has absorbed a huge amount of heat from the warming atmosphere, ocean currents transport that heat differently across regions, contributing to significant regional variations in the amount of sea level change. Understanding changes in ocean heat content and the role of currents in shaping patterns of warming is critical to assessing current and future global and regional climate change, sea level rise, and coastal flooding risk. 1 Before the 1990s, however, most ocean...

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 Earth system models have recently begun to...

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 set of...

USGCRP coordinates and supports the engagement of the U.S. science community in major international assessments on global change science, including those conducted by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), as well as science panels informing the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer process. International assessment reports provide policymakers with regular updates on the state of knowledge, current and future...

Satellite observations of sea ice thickness provide an opportunity to improve seasonal predictions of Arctic sea ice cover. Arctic sea ice grows and melts each year with the seasons, reaching its low point in September. Summer sea ice cover has shrunk significantly over the past thirty years, although variation from year to year means that the downward trend is not uniform. Arctic sea ice plays a critical role in regulating weather and climate in and beyond the region. Sea ice decline activates a feedback loop in the climate system: as highly reflective ice cover shrinks, darker ocean waters...