The ozone hole, an environmental problem often associated with the 1980s, is still a clear and present issue more than 30 years later. Despite efforts to clean up the stratosphere of ozone-depleting chemicals, this year’s ozone hole minimum bottomed out at the fourth lowest on record. The ozone hole this year grew to a size of 10.9 million square

Remember the night you spent sweating in your Chewbacca costume because you expected Halloween to be colder? Well, that may start to happen more often. When Halloween comes around, it can be difficult to forecast the weather. Fall days are often unpredictable year to year. It’s a season of transition and unstable weather. One year may be

The swollen rivers only dropped back to normal water levels last week, but flood-weary Charleston, S.C. is already seeing water in the streets again. This time it’s not a 1,000-year deluge from the sky, it’s high tide. The so-called “king tides” are a natural occurrence. Unusually high tides occur several times each year, often depending on the

The Northeast and Midwest will need to turn up the heat this weekend. The first cold snap of the season is pushing through, dropping low temperatures into the 30s and maybe even a few flakes of snow in some areas. A cold front pulling polar air from Canada will dip into the Northern Plains region on Thursday. Through the weekend it will move east,

This may be the last we hear of Hurricane Joaquin, except for changes the storm made to the record books. As of Monday afternoon, Joaquin is spinning about 200 miles north of Bermuda and has no more land in its path. The storm weakened significantly in the past couple of days and has dropped to a Category 1 hurricane with 85 mph winds. The

Hurricane Joaquin is continuing to puzzle forecasters. The storm, now spinning over the Bahamas, was upgraded Thursday afternoon to a Category 4, with sustained winds of 130 mph. But where the storm is headed next is still uncertain. The entirety of the Bahamas is under some type of watch or warning. The National Hurricane center expects 10 to 15

A combination of climate-driven sea level rise and stronger tropical cyclones is putting New York City at risk for more and higher floods like those seen during Hurricane Sandy, a group of researchers has found. In a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers compared sea level and storm surge height

The moon will look a bit unusual this weekend. The stars – or, more accurately, a star, planet and moon – will align perfectly to create a rare supermoon lunar eclipse on Sunday night. The phenomenon has not occurred in more than 30 years, according to NASA, and will not happen again until 2033. Lunar eclipses and supermoons on their own are not

Shark Week, the annual television extravaganza featuring the most terrifying and toothiest fish in the sea, will wind down over the weekend. But even though sharks may disappear from the collective consciousness for another year, that doesn’t mean they’ll cease to exist. Like many species, sharks face a looming threat: a changing climate. The most

Beachgoers may love ocean waters that are growing balmier in a warming world, but corals, and subsequently the ecosystems they support, do not. Rising ocean temperatures are proving detrimental to both ocean species and coral reefs, with the impact on coral perhaps most noticeably seen in bleaching. On Monday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric