Desertification. The word invokes images of sand dunes blowing over abandoned farms as some irresistible, dark force steadily transforms fertile fields into inhospitable wasteland. The United Nations’ ...

EO Kids is investigating how similar snow and clouds look from space. In this issue, discover how satellites measure light to help scientists know which is which. You can also create your very own ...

When it comes to climate and climate change, the Earth's radiation budget is what makes it all happen. Swathed in its protective blanket of atmospheric gases against the boiling Sun and frigid space, ...

Pine trees (genus Pinus) are evergreen, conifers (they produce cones that encase reproduction seeds) and can be found throughout the world, but they are native to northern temperate regions. There are ...

Air temperatures on Earth have been rising since the Industrial Revolution. While natural variability plays some part, the preponderance of evidence indicates that human activities—particularly ...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated in their most recent report that global surface temperature at the end of this century will probably be between 1.8 and 4 degrees Celsius warmer ...

Since its launch in February 2013, Landsat 8 has collected about 400 scenes of the Earth’s surface per day. Each of these scenes covers an area of about 185 by 185 kilometers (115 by 115 miles)—34,200 ...

The warm, shallow ocean waters of the tropics have talkative “forests” of their own. Brightly colored mounds of coral grow in the warm ocean waters, quickly when nutrients are plentiful and more ...

Phytoplankton thrive along coastlines and continental shelves, along the equator in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, and in high-latitude areas. Winds play a strong role in the distribution of ...

Among the mysteries of the South American Monsoon, explains Fu, is how the first thunderstorms of the wet season get started. A monsoon is an atmospheric see-saw in which the large-scale circulation ...

In the 1960s, the Soviet Union undertook a major water diversion project on the arid plains of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. The region’s two major rivers, fed by snowmelt and ...

Examine the set of graphs below for a given city. Read carefully the temperature and precipitation scales on the graphs. Review the biome information. Two biome choices are given for each set of ...