NCAR, working with federal agencies and universities as well as the insurance and energy industries, has launched an intensive study to examine how global warming will influence hurricanes in the next few decades.

Andrea Sealy has been working for the last two years to find some answers to the many questions surrounding the Sahelian drought.

Andrea Sealy, NCAR's Advanced Study Program • If you are from the Caribbean and you're good at math and science, the advice you get is to become a doctor, says Sealy. "But I never liked biology much," she adds. Now she's a researcher at the Caribbean Institute for Meteorology and Hydrology.

Mountain pine beetles appear to be doing more than killing large swaths of forests in the Rocky Mountains. Scientists suspect they are also altering local weather patterns and air quality.

In a potential boon for agriculture, a NASA-funded effort that involves NCAR and the private firm DTN/Meteorlogix has produced one of the world’s most accurate systems for predicting soil temperature up to two days in advance.