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    The most intense sunlight on Earth can be found in the Atacama Desert

    Forget Arizona or Florida — sun worshippers ought to head to the Atacama Desert in South America. It’s there that the sun’s rays on Earth are most intense, beating out places like Mount Everest and even, occasionally, rivaling the conditions on Venus, researchers report July 3 in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

    Satellite data have suggested that the Altiplano — a high-altitude plateau in the Atacama that straddles parts of Chile, Bolivia, Peru and Argentina — experiences the most intense levels of sunlight on Earth. But since satellites look down on our planet’s surface from afar, it’s important to verify that claim with on-the-ground data, says Raúl Cordero, a physicist at the University of Santiago in Chile. “How good are these estimates?”

    To answer that question, Cordero and colleagues set up a small atmospheric observatory, housed in two shipping containers, in the Chilean Altiplano. Since 2016, the researchers have been measuring solar radiation levels at the site using a pyranometer, a palm-sized instrument sensitive to ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared light.

    A researcher working high in the Andes Mountains of Chile sets up an instrument to measure solar radiation.R. Cordero

    Based on the first five years of data from the observatory, the average amount of solar power hitting each square meter of the landscape — 308 watts — is consistent with the earlier satellite observations and even higher than values recorded by a pyranometer near the summit of Mount Everest, the team reports.

    The researchers also captured bursts of extremely intense solar radiation. One event, in January 2017, blasted the site with 2,177 watts per square meter — more than seven times the average. The intensity of that burst and others like it rivals solar radiation on Venus, which is over 40 million kilometers closer to the sun than Earth is (SN: 2/13/18). Such events, which typically last just a few minutes, are caused by thin clouds scattering light toward the ground, the researchers suggest. More

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    Here’s how much climate change increases the odds of brutally hot summers

    The recent, record-breaking heat waves that have scorched the southwestern United States and northern Mexico, China and southern Europe were made dramatically more likely due to human-caused climate change, researchers report July 25 in a study from the World Weather Attribution network.

    “This is absolutely not a surprise,” climate scientist Friederike Otto of Imperial College London said at a July 24 news briefing. But “while the weather is changing as expected, how much it hurts us is larger than expected.”

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    These intense and at times deadly heat waves are occurring as high-pressure systems stall across the Northern Hemisphere, creating barely budging heat domes (SN: 7/19/23).  Phoenix, for example, has reached at least 43.3° C (110° Fahrenheit) every day for more than three weeks. 

    Otto and her colleagues used computers to simulate Earth’s climate, with and without human-caused climate change, to assess how likely the recent heat waves would have been under different climate conditions.

    In a world without climate change, they found, the recent extreme heat in China would be expected roughly once every 250 years. Now, it’s a once-in-five-years phenomenon, or 50 times more likely to occur. Meanwhile the extreme heat waves in southern Europe and North America, which would have been virtually impossible without climate change, are now likely to occur once every 10 years and 15 years, respectively.

    Should climate warming reach 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, these events could occur every two to five years, the simulations showed. We’ve already warmed by at least 1.1 degrees C since then (SN: 12/22/22).

    Though it’s still too early to pin down the human toll of these extreme events, hundreds of deaths have already been reported from regions around the world, and power shortage concerns grow as the demand for cooling surges.

    “The risks are rising faster than we are adapting,” Otto said. “We are much more vulnerable than we might have liked to believe in the past.” More

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    What’s causing this summer’s extreme heat waves?

    The dog days of summer are upon us. Brutal heat waves are roasting regions around the globe, smashing records with unrelenting severity.

    In the southwest United States and northern Mexico, devastating heat has been scorching the region for weeks. For 19 straight days and counting, temperatures in Phoenix have reached above 43.3° Celsius (110° Fahrenheit), surpassing a record streak from 1974. The Texas city of El Paso has endured an unprecedented 33 consecutive days of temperatures reaching over 37.8° C (100° F), and that streak is only expected to continue. And just after midnight on July 17, Death Valley, Calif., may have sweltered under the highest temperature ever recorded anywhere for that time: 48.9° C (120° F).

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    China has also been enduring extreme heat for weeks. On July 16, the township of Sanbao broke not only the national record with a temperature of 52.2° C (126° F), but also the record for highest temperature above 40˚ N latitude. Meanwhile, southern Europe is in its second heat wave in a week, with Rome recording a new all-time high of 42.9° C (109.2° F) on July 18 while a town in Catalonia, Spain set a new record for the region, 45.3° C (113.5° F).

    What’s concocting these bouts of extreme heat? It’s partly because the world has been exceptionally warm this year, thanks to the compounding of human-caused climate change with a natural climate phenomenon called El Niño, whose influence is known to temporarily warm our planet (SN: 7/13/23).

    But it’s not just that Earth’s a hotter stovetop; the cooks have been busy. The jet streams, powerful ribbons of wind that control much of the planet’s weather, have been meandering and getting stuck, holding bulges of hot air over many parts of the Earth. While that’s not unusual, some scientists have suggested that climate change may be altering the dynamics of the consequential winds.

    Here’s what we know about how climate change is impacting extreme heat and how these potentially dangerous events occur.

    Extreme heat waves are becoming more likely

    Let’s start with that hot stovetop. Humans have been warming the planet for decades by emitting climate-warming greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. That’s made extreme heat waves more common, many researchers say.

    Since 2004, scientists have conducted attribution studies to estimate how much climate change may have influenced the probability and severity of a specific bout of extreme weather. These studies essentially simulate the world with and without climate change to compare how often certain types of extreme weather events occur.

    The work of the World Weather Attribution initiative has repeatedly indicated that climate change has made extreme weather events like heat waves more likely and more severe (SN: 4/11/22; SN: 7/7/21).

    A May report concluded that an April heat wave in South Asia — during which locations in Thailand and Laos set new national temperature records of 45.4° C and 42.9° C, respectively — was made at least 30 times more likely due to climate change.

    Another study suggested that a different heat wave in northern Africa and southwestern Europe, which subjected some areas to temperatures 20 degrees C higher than is normal in April, was at least 100 times more likely due to climate change.

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    Climate change is pushing heat waves in general to have higher temperatures, but it’s having a particularly strong impact on the frequency of the most extreme events, says atmospheric scientist Noboru Nakamura of the University of Chicago.

    “What used to be once every 1,000 years might now occur every 20 years,” he says. “It’s still a rare event, but … you can actually feel that in our daily lives.”

    How heat waves form

    What’s actually whipping up these summer scorchers, and why are only certain regions getting roasted?

    The answer lies roughly 8 to 14 kilometers high in the sky. There, the jet streams flow at about 177 kilometers per hour on average, though they can reach speeds of more than 400 kilometers per hour — faster than a Shinkansen bullet train.

    These powerful winds control much of Earth’s weather by transporting high- and low-pressure systems around the world.

    Jet streams develop where large masses of air with different temperatures meet, flowing faster where the temperature contrast is stronger. When jet streams are blowing strong, they tend to orient themselves more parallel to the equator, says atmospheric scientist Jennifer Francis of the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Falmouth, Mass. “But when those winds get weaker … then we tend to see the jet stream take these bigger meanders.”

    When the jet stream meanders, it forms broad waves, with crests and troughs that reach north and south for hundreds of kilometers. Jet streams in the northern and southern hemispheres typically undulate more during their respective summers. Due to Earth’s axial tilt, polar regions receive more warming sunlight during their summers, weakening their temperature contrast with the tropics. As the waves become amplified, high- and low-pressure systems in the crests and troughs encroach farther north and south. Sometimes these pressure systems become stuck over one spot for days to weeks, causing weather to persist over a region.

    When a high-pressure system gets stuck over an area, it pushes air down toward the surface, compressing and warming the air. The high pressure also pushes clouds away, clearing the sky for the hot sun to beat down unabated. These factors compound to produce a heat dome, a phenomenon that scorches and often dries landscapes.

    Jet streams are mostly high-velocity wind currents (shown in red and purple) that often flow at the altitudes passenger planes frequent. When the currents form broad crests and troughs (one shown over the eastern United States), the winds can weaken (slow winds are shown in green). Swirling high-pressure systems (one shown over the U.S. Southwest and northern Mexico) can get stuck over areas, generating persistent heat. The city of Phoenix is indicated by the green dot. This graphic shows jet stream activity on July 18.N. Ogasa, C. Beccario/earth.nullschool.net

    Source: GFS/NCEP/NOAA

    An exception is when heat domes form by coastlines — such as the one that has formed by the U.S. Gulf Coast. Since warmer air can carry more moisture, heat domes near the ocean can make for weather that is both hot and humid, a potentially lethal combination for humans (SN: 7/27/22).

    It’s a bit of a mystery why pressure systems become stuck, Nakamura says, making the phenomenon difficult to predict. It may occur when jet streams become especially wavy, he and a colleague reported in 2018 in Science. The waves may get stuck like cars in a traffic jam, causing weather to idle in place.

    But this explanation is a theoretical one, and more evidence is needed to validate it, Nakamura says. Until then, he says, the underlying mechanics of those jams will remain elusive.

    The jet streams’ uncertain future

    A related, but similarly unresolved, problem is how climate change may affect the dance of the jet streams in the future. In 2012, Francis and a colleague proposed climate change could make the powerful winds more wobbly.

    “The Arctic is warming about four times faster than the globe as a whole,” Francis says. “That means that the north-south temperature difference has been getting weaker and weaker.” As a result, jet streams may be becoming more unstable, she says, and more prone to meandering.

    But that’s still “a very hotly contested hypothesis,” Nakamura says, pointing out that some climate simulations have suggested that in the Northern Hemisphere, the jet stream may actually become less wavy. “There is not a widely accepted consensus on this,” Nakamura says.

    Even if the fate of the jet streams remains up in the air, one thing seems clear: Extreme heat waves aren’t going anywhere. More

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    This ‘thermal cloak’ keeps spaces from getting either too hot or cold

    If you’ve ever burned your hands on a car steering wheel, you know how hot the inside of a car can get on a summer day. But a new fabric could one day help cars and other objects stay cool in the summer and warm in the winter.

    Researchers created a prototype of the fabric, which acts as a “thermal cloak” that keeps the space underneath it from getting too hot or too cold. The cloak, described in the July 11 Device, doesn’t require an external power source, which could reduce energy consumption associated with heating and cooling (SN: 9/28/18).

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    Globally, heating and cooling make up 38 percent of energy use in buildings and 12 percent of total energy consumption. Materials like this thermal cloak could help keep us comfortable during heat waves while reducing carbon dioxide emissions associated with electricity used in temperature control, says Aaswath Raman, an applied physicist at UCLA who was not involved in the study.

    In the new study, Kehang Cui, an engineer at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and colleagues built the cloak using two layers. The outer layer is made of white silica fibers that reflect visible light, coated with hexagonal boron nitride, a ceramic material that reflects ultraviolet light and helps dissipate heat. Together, the silica fibers and boron nitride reflect 96 percent of the sunlight that hits the fabric. At the same time, the outer layer absorbs heat from the surrounding area and emits that energy as infrared light, which also lowers the temperature under the cloak through a process called radiative cooling.

    Though the outer layer keeps the space under the cloak cooler for longer than an uncovered area, the cloaked space slowly warms up throughout the day. The inner layer, made of aluminum foil, keeps the space warm at night by trapping some of that heat inside, similar to an insulating survival blanket.

    The researchers tested the cloak material’s durability under several extreme conditions. They baked the fabric at 800° Celsius, just about hot enough to melt table salt. They also exposed it to extreme cold by dunking it in liquid nitrogen, subjected it to the same amount of vibration as a rocket launch, doused it in acid and blasted it with fire from a butane torch — all with virtually no changes to the material’s structure or performance. This extreme durability might lend itself to use in spacecraft or extraterrestrial environments, the team says.

    To see the fabric in action, Cui and colleagues built a full-size prototype cloak and tested it on an electric car. On a summer day in Shanghai, the cloak kept the car at about 23° C — up to 8 degrees C lower than the outside temperature and 28 degrees C lower than the inside of an uncloaked car. The cloak also kept the car about 5 degrees C warmer than the outside air on a winter night.

    The cloak “definitely shows the capability of saving energy, but the next step is that we want to demonstrate it in even larger-scale field tests [such as rooftops] to see the impact on our daily lives,” Cui says. More

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    Antarctic sea ice has been hitting record lows for most of this year

    Something strange is happening to the Antarctic’s sea ice. The areal expanse of floating ice fringing the continent is not only at a record low for this time of year — surpassing a record just set in 2022 — but ice extent has been hitting record lows throughout the year.

    “What’s happened here is unlike the Arctic sea ice expanse,” says Mark Serreze, a climate scientist and the director of the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center, or NSIDC, in Boulder, Colo. We’ve come to expect a dramatic decline in sea ice at Earth’s other pole, he says (SN: 9/25/19). “Not much has happened to Antarctica’s sea ice until the last few years. But it’s just plummeted.”

    NSIDC uses satellite-gleaned data, collected daily, to keep an eye on the spread of sea ice at both poles. Throughout most of 2023, the ring of sea ice around Antarctica has repeatedly set new record lows, staying well below the average extent from 1981 to 2010. On February 21 — the height of the Southern Hemisphere’s summer — the sea ice expanse hit an all-time low since record-keeping began in 1978, of 1.79 million square kilometers. That’s 130,000 square kilometers — about the size of the state of New York — smaller than the previous recorded minimum, reached on February 25, 2022.

    Subpar sea ice

    The amount of ocean around Antarctica covered in sea ice in 2023 (red) has stayed well below the average from 1981 to 2010 (black). Sea ice expanse hit a record low in late February — surpassing a record set just in 2022 (blue). The sea ice expanse for every year from 1981 to 2021 is shown in gray.

    Even as the Southern Hemisphere shifted into winter, Antarctic sea ice remained at record low levels. On June 27, the ice was dotted across about 11.7 million square kilometers of ocean. That’s about 2.6 million square kilometers below the 1981–2010 average, and about 1.2 million square kilometers below the previous lowest extent on record for June 27, set in 2022.

    Unlike Arctic ice, whose dwindling is known to be closely tied to global warming, it’s been harder to parse the reasons for changes in Antarctic sea ice extent. That difficulty has made it unclear whether changes are the result of natural variability or whether “something big has changed,” Serreze says.

    As of June 28, the sea ice surrounding Antarctica, as measured by satellite, covered a smaller area of ocean than the average extent from 1981 to 2010 for this time of year. Yellow lines and dots represent missing satellite data.U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center

    The last few years have given scientists pause (SN: 6/27/17). “We’re kind of dropping off an edge,” Serreze says. It’s not yet clear whether this year’s extent is part of a larger trend, he notes. But “the longer that persists, the more likely it is that something big is happening.”

    The Arctic and the Antarctic regions are polar opposites, so to speak, in their geographic setting. Ice in the Arctic Ocean is confined to a relatively small body of water ringed by land. The Antarctic, by contrast, is a landmass surrounded by ocean, which means the sea ice around the continent is much more mobile than up north, with a larger seasonal range as it expands in the Southern Hemisphere’s winter and shrinks in summer. Climate simulations have, accordingly, consistently predicted that the Arctic would show bigger sea ice losses as the planet warms, at least at first, while Antarctica would be slower to respond.

    As to why the Antarctic ice has tracked so low this year there are a few possible culprits. Regional climate patterns — particularly an air pressure pattern known as the Southern Annular Mode that shifts the direction of winds blowing around the continent — can pack or diffuse the sea ice cover around Antarctica. And other regional patterns, such as the El Niño Southern Oscillation, can affect both ocean and air circulation in the southern high latitudes.

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    Right now, scientists are concerned most with what lies beneath the ice (SN: 12/13/21). “There’s growing evidence that there has been some kind of change in ocean circulation that is bringing more heat” to the region, which affects the ice cover, Serreze says. “There are a bunch of people looking into this; we’re really blitzing to get the data. We need to understand what the heck is going on in the ocean.” More

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    Dust from a shrinking Great Salt Lake may be accelerating Utah’s snowmelt

    Utah’s trademarked “greatest snow on earth” may be getting dirtier — and melting faster — due in part to dust blowing off newly exposed lakebed from the shrinking Great Salt Lake.

    Snow in the Wasatch Mountains above Salt Lake City had more dust deposited on it in 2022 than in any year since observations began in 2009, researchers report in the June Environmental Research Letters. The dust accumulation caused snow to disappear 17 days earlier than if the snow had been clean.

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    An earlier, faster snowmelt may alter the water supply for the 1.2 million people who live in the region, as well as ecosystems downstream, says McKenzie Skiles, a snow hydrologist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. It also affects the region’s ski areas, which contribute more than $1.5 billion per year to the local economy.

    In arid parts of the western United States, snow acts as a natural reservoir. More than half the municipal water in Salt Lake City comes from four streams that drain snow out of the Wasatch Mountains. But current forecasting tools don’t account for the impact of dust, Skiles says, which absorbs sunlight, speeding up snowmelt. That means people can’t accurately predict when snow runoff will happen so they can use water efficiently.

    As an avid skier, Skiles noticed the slopes near Salt Lake City looked especially dirty in 2022. So she and colleagues investigated whether the increase in dust was related to consecutive years of record-low water in the Great Salt Lake (SN: 4/17/23).

    The team collected snow samples from a plot adjacent to Alta Ski Resort and found that storms deposited substantial amounts of dust 16 times during the 2022 snowmelt season. After calculating where the dust came from during each storm based on wind direction and atmospheric conditions, the team found that Great Salt Lake contributed nearly a quarter of the total dust to the study site. It also released the most dust relative to the lake’s exposed surface area. This was surprising, Skiles says, because the Great Salt Lake’s dry lakebed is tiny compared with the exposed surfaces of neighboring dust sources, such as the much bigger West Desert, a dry landscape west of Great Salt Lake. The West Desert contributed about of half the dust, while other dried-up lakebeds and deserts, some as far away as Idaho and Nevada, delivered the rest.

    A record amount of dust coated snow at the Atwater Study Plot near Alta, Utah, in spring of 2022. The dust speeded up snowmelt by 17 days.Otto Lang

    “The future of Utah is going to be drier,” says Patrick Belmont, a hydrologist at Utah State University in Logan who was not part of the study. Earlier snowmelt causes the landscape to dry out faster, creating “a feedback loop that’s hard to break out of,” he explains. As Great Salt Lake shrinks and deposits more dust on the mountains, there’s less water available to refill the lake during the summer, which in turn exposes a larger dust source as the shoreline recedes.

    A smaller lake also means less winter snow, Belmont says, as evaporation from Great Salt Lake contributes up to 10 percent of the snowpack in the Wasatch range. “Unless we make some big policy changes, we should expect to see a much lower Great Salt Lake, and it’s very possible that we lose the lake altogether.”

    Skiles and her colleagues plan to keep monitoring the snowpack and to use remote sensing to see if dust is impacting snow across all of the mountains that drain into the Great Salt Lake. “We need more years of data to understand if this is the new normal,” she says. More