Thanks to deicing treatment and careful route selection, commercial pilots now avoid most of the threat that ice will encase critical parts of a plane. But another, more mysterious kind of in-flight icing hazard is now gaining attention.

Scientists are targeting thunderstorms across the U.S. to discover what happens when clouds suck up air from Earth’s surface many miles into the atmosphere.

Many facets of everyday life, from boarding a plane to turning on the lights or driving down the highway, are becoming safer and more cost-effective with the help of technologies rooted in atmospheric science.

Why would a cooling of the Pacific Ocean help stoke tornadoes in the United States? Researchers are beginning to dig deeper into the connections between severe U.S. thunderstorms and the sea.

The winter of 2011–12 was the second in a row to feature La Niña, the quasi-cyclic cooling of the eastern tropical Pacific—but the two seasons departed from the La Niña script in strikingly different ways.