GoKawiil
Tech News
NOAA data shows the contiguous United States just endured its warmest summer since record-keeping began, with an average temperature of 75.6°F and daytime highs averaging 88.6°F, surpassing the previous record set jointly by 2021 and 1936. The South and West bore the brunt of the heat, while Arizona logged its second-hottest summer ever and Alaska and Hawaii each posted their third-warmest.
NOAA announced on September 14 that El Niño has officially crossed the threshold to become a 'very strong event' for the Northern Hemisphere fall and winter of 2026-27, a designation known as a Super El Niño. Forecasters say this could become the strongest El Niño on record, with effects lingering into 2027 and potentially raising sea levels along California's coast by up to a foot.
The EU's Copernicus climate agency reported that August tied with July 2023 as the hottest month ever measured globally, following a summer that also produced the second-hottest June and July on record. NOAA separately confirmed this was the hottest US summer, surpassing the Dust Bowl era, while global average temperatures ran 1.65°C above preindustrial levels.
NOAA has released new agency-wide priorities framed as cutting red tape and boosting fishing communities, following Trump's April executive order on seafood competitiveness. The plan includes opening marine national monuments to commercial fishing, narrowing critical habitat protections, and loosening scientific standards that have guided fisheries management for decades.
Researchers with the Scott River Watershed Council built artificial beaver dams on Sugar Creek and French Creek in northern California starting in 2015, using wooden posts, branches, gravel and mud to mimic structures once built by beavers before fur trappers wiped them out in the 1830s. The dams created roughly 9,000 square metres of cooler, slower-moving wetland habitat capable of supporting more than 8,500 juvenile coho salmon, and survival rates in these restored areas jumped from about 8% to 60% compared to untreated stretches, according to findings published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.
A new analysis draws on atmospheric measurement records and emission datasets to explain why global methane concentrations temporarily plateaued rather than kept rising. Researchers attribute the pause primarily to increases in nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions and a geographic shift of those emissions toward the Southern Hemisphere, which altered atmospheric chemistry governing methane's main removal pathway via hydroxyl radicals.