There is a river in the sky above your head right now. It carries more water than the Amazon, but you cannot see it. It controls whether your state is in drought or flood. It is called an atmospheric river, and on December 22, 2010, it had already delivered 75 percent of California’s entire annual … Read more
A child in Mumbai watches the first fat drops of the monsoon splatter against the window. A farmer in Iowa scans the sky, calculating the odds of relief. A commuter in London pulls a coat tighter as drizzle begins to fall. Rain touches every human life, yet most of us have never stopped to ask … Read more
A child presses her nose against the window, watching white flakes drift past the streetlight. The world outside is going quiet under a fresh blanket of snow. She turns to her parent with the question every adult has heard and most have struggled to answer: why does it snow? The answer is a story about … Read more
A single molecule of water that fell as rain on ancient Rome has circled through oceans, then clouds, then into rivers and soil thousands of times since then. It may be falling on your roof this afternoon. The water cycle makes this possible, and it has been running without pause for billions of years. No … Read more
Every cloud you have ever seen, from the thinnest wisp of cirrus to the black anvil of a thunderstorm, began the same way: warm air rose, cooled, and let go of invisible water. In Simple Terms A cloud is visible water. Warm air rises, cools, and lets go of water vapor as tiny droplets or … Read more
The atmosphere is not just warmer now. It is thirstier, and when it drinks its fill, it dumps what it took all at once. Most people think of rain as something that just happens. A storm rolls in, it pours, it passes. But the physics behind rain global warming has rewritten that script. Since the … Read more