The standing debate over whether hydrological systems are deterministic or stochastic has been taken to a new level by con-troversial applications of chaos mathematics. This paper reviews the procedure, constraints, and past usage of a popular chaos time series analysis method, correlation integral analysis, in hydrology and adds a new analysis of daily streamflow from a pristine watershed. Signi ... read more >>

Post-glacial rebound and changes in the Earth’s gravity field protect the Finnish coast against rising sea levels, especially in the Gulf of Bothnia. In the Gulf of Finland, the sea level is starting to rise.
The rise in ocean levels varies regionally

Global warming raises ocean levels at an accelerating pace, currently on average about three millimetres per year. The reasons for this are the ... read more >>

Sewage treatment plants are "especially vulnerable" to problems in the climate change era, write the report authors. Unlike housing and transportation, which are nice to have near the coast but technically movable, the very function of sewage plants all but requires them to locate near waterways. A low-lying placement lets gravity do some of the work piping waste into plants, and proximity to wat ... read more >>

For two years now, flower growers along the shore of Kenya’s Lake Naivasha have been paying farmers in the hills 40 kilometers away to adopt sustainable agriculture practices. They’re doing it to save their lake, but it’s also helping farmers lift themselves out of poverty. ... read more >>

Using new airborne sensors to measure mountain snowpacks, NASA says it has opened a new era in understanding the source of 75 percent of the drinking water in the American West. "We believe this is the future of water management in the western United States," a NASA scientist said in an announcement today. ... read more >>

The Arctic's sea ice melted at a record pace in 2012, the ninth-hottest year on record, compounding concerns about climate change underscored by extreme weather such as Hurricane Sandy, the UN weather agency said Thursday.

In a report on the situation in 2012, the World Meterological Organisation said that during the August to September melting season, the Arctic's sea ice cover was just 3.4 m ... read more >>

The skin of sea ice that covers the Arctic Ocean has reached its maximum extent for 2013, the National Snow and Ice Data Center announced Monday, and the annual melt season has begun. As of March 15, ice covered 5.84 million square miles of ocean, the sixth-lowest since satellite observations began in the 1970’s, and 283,000 square miles lower than the 1979-2000 average. Reflecting the influence ... read more >>

Near the moonscape summit of the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii, an infrared analyzer will soon make history. Sometime in the next month, it is expected to record a daily concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of more than 400 parts per million (p.p.m.), a value not reached at this key surveillance point for a few million years. There will be no balloons or noisemakers to celebrate the ev ... read more >>

Climate change and global warming may cause sea levels to rise and flood coastal cities across the world. Over the past century, the Global Mean Sea Level has risen by 4 to 8 inches. And according to estimates by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (PDF), it will keep rising between 8 inches and 6.6 feet by 2100.

How will the world look if that happens? In November of 2012, The ... read more >>

As spring rains soaked the central United States and helped conquer the historic drought, a new problem has sprouted: The fields have turned to mud.
The weekly drought monitor report, released Thursday by National Drought Mitigation Center in Lincoln, Neb., showed the heavy rains that also caused some flooding in the last week brought drought relief to the upper Midwest, western Corn Belt and ce ... read more >>