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 >>

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 >>

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 >>

The deceptively calm waters of Langa Langa Lagoon on the west coast of Malaita Island in the Solomon Islands is home to thousands of people who have lived on artificial islands for centuries. For generations the islanders in this south-west Pacific nation have employed tenacity and ingenuity to maintain their existence on the tiny low-lying man-made atolls, devoid of freshwater and arable land. B ... read more >>

Sometimes weather forecasts can be life saving; enabling people to get out of the path of a dangerous storm for example. In the developed world we receive ample warning of severe weather, but in many developing countries lives and livelihoods are lost in extreme weather. Rosalind Cornforth, a meteorologist at the University of Reading, was shocked to see this first hand on a visit to Senegal last ... read more >>

Flood-weary residents fortified their homes against the rain-swollen Illinois River and considered whether to stand their ground as waterways remained flooded across the US mid-west. Even as some of therivers showed signs of cresting, forecasters said the recovery would not be fast or easy. The National Weather Service expected many of the waterways to remain high into next month, straining levee ... read more >>

"The concept of 'peak water' is very analogous to peak oil...we're using fossil groundwater. That is, we're pumping groundwater faster than nature naturally recharges it," says Peter Gleick in this short expert analysis from the Environmental Change and Security Program. Gleick, president and co-founder of the Pacific Institute and author of the newest edition of "The World's Water," explains the ... read more >>

An unseasonable May storm system dropped more than a foot of snow across the central Plains and the upper Midwest on Thursday, closing roads and causing power outages in Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin. The winter storm system has delivered about 18 inches of snow across parts of northwest Wisconsin and more than 15 inches in southern Minnesota, according to the National Weather Service. ... read more >>

Studies of snow cover published in Geophysical Research Letters and the Arctic Report Card: Update for 2012 found that, between 1979 and 2012, June snow cover extent decreased by 17.6 percent per decade compared to the 1979–2000 average. ... read more >>

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 >>