Every snowfall is different, including how much water is packed into the flakes and how that changes over the life of a storm. This can make it very hard to figure out how much snow “really” falls in a given storm.

Dione Lee Rossiter, University of California, Santa Cruz • This Ph.D. student studies clouds, especially over the subtropical ocean—the area just north and south of the tropics. She's interested in their invisible physical changes, or microphysics, and a whole lot more.

The presence of El Niño boosts the odds of big Denver-area snowstorms, even though the region's winters as a whole aren’t substantially wetter during El Niño. It’s a good example of nuance in the relationship between El Niño and climate.

As the U.S. Senate considers climate change legislation, 18 leading scientific organizations have sent a letter to members of the senate reaffirming the scientific consensus that climate change is occurring and that greenhouse gases from human activities are the primary driver.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) has passed an Open Access policy requiring that peer-reviewed research published by its scientists and staff in scientific journals be made publicly available online through its institutional repository.