Chicago is one of 18 cities chosen for the Heat Watch Campaign, which will map the city's urban heat islands — places with fewer trees and more pavement, where temperatures can soar 20 degrees higher than surrounding areas.
NOAA
State climatologist Trent Ford said conditions aren't alarming, yet, but if June isn't signficantly wetter than May, there's cause for concern.
About 60% of the Midwest and northern Great Plain states are in a drought. Nearly the entire stretch of the Mississippi River — from Minnesota to the river’s mouth in Louisiana — has experienced below average rainfall over the past two months.
Anchored a mile off Navy Pier, Chuoy the Buoy fills a Chicago-sized gap in shoreline monitoring. Swimmers, boaters, anglers, researchers and meteorologists alike will benefit from data collected close to the city’s lakefront.
Methane is a big contributor to climate change, leading to about a 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit (0.5 degrees Celsius) increase in temperature since the 19th century, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Carbon dioxide has caused about 50% more warming than methane.
Earth simmered to the sixth hottest year on record in 2021, according to several newly released temperature measurements.
According to a federal report released Monday, the U.S. experienced 20 billion-dollar weather and climate disasters in 2021, including hurricanes, wildfires and out-of-season December tornadoes.
Temperatures edged out the record for the continental U.S. set back in 1936 during the “Dust Bowl” summer, according to the latest climate report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The Chicago region is warming faster than the globe, says the newly sworn-in administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. How a new plan aims to take on the root cause of climate change: greenhouse gas emissions.
New reports show that Earth’s surface temperature last year was its highest since modern temperature record keeping began in 1880. The global record was also broken in 2014, although 2015 saw dramatic increases by comparison.