Sea ice impacts most of the Arctic environment, from ocean circulation and marine ecosystems to animal migration and marine transportation. Sea ice has thinned and decreased in age over the observational record. Ice extent has decreased. Reduced ice cover has warmed the surface ocean, accelerated coastal erosion and impacted biological productivity. Declines in Arctic sea-ice extent cannot be explained by internal climate variability alone and can be attributed to anthropogenic effects.

Global environmental change necessitates increased predictive capacity; for forests, recent advances in technology provide the response to this challenge. “Next-generation” remote-sensing instruments can measure forest biogeochemistry and structural change, and individual-based models can predict the fates of vast numbers of simulated trees, all growing and competing according to their ecological attributes in altered environments across large areas. Application of these models at continental scales is now feasible using current computing power.

Since 2004, Halji village, home of the oldest Buddhist Monastery in north-western Nepal, has suffered from recurrent glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs). A sudden englacial drainage of a supraglacial lake, located at a distance of 6.5 km from the village, was identified as the source of the flood. The topography of the lake basin was mapped by combining differential Global Positioning System (DGPS) measurements with a structure-from-motion (SFM) approach using terrestrial photographs.

In this study, researchers explored the relationships between the satellite-retrievedfire counts(FC), fire radiative power(FRP) and aerosol indices using multi-satellite datasets at a daily time-step covering ten different biomass burning regions in Asia.Wefirst assessed the variations inMODIS-retrieved aerosol optical depths (AOD’s)in agriculture,forests, plantation and peat land burning regions and then usedMODIS FC and FRP (hereafter FC/FRP)to explain the variations in AOD characteristics.

We revisited long-term observations of PM2.5 at ground-based stations in Japan during 2001–2012 to examine possible impacts of Siberian wildfires on regional air quality. Exceedances of Japan's air quality standard for daily mean concentration (35 μg m−3) were observed several times at Rishiri Island in northern Japan in the spring of 2003 and 2008 when intense wildfires occurred in Siberia.

Original Source

The 2014–2015 Bárðarbunga-Veiðivötn fissure eruption at Holuhraun produced about 1.5 km3 of lava, making it the largest eruption in Iceland in more than 200 years. Over the course of the eruption, daily volcanic sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions exceeded daily SO2 emissions from all anthropogenic sources in Europe in 2010 by at least a factor of 3. We present surface air quality observations from across Northern Europe together with satellite remote sensing data and model simulations of volcanic SO2 for September 2014.

Satellite remote sensing of tropospheric nitrogen dioxide (NO2) can provide valuable information for estimating surface nitrogen oxides (NOx) emissions. Using an exponentially modified Gaussian (EMG) method and taking into account the effect of wind on observed NO2 distributions, we estimate 3-year moving-average emissions of summertime NOx from 35 US (United States) urban areas directly from NO2 retrievals of the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) during 2005–2014.

The negative impacts of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) exposure on human health are a primary motivator for air quality research. However, estimates of the air pollution health burden vary considerably and strongly depend on the datasets and methodology. Satellite observations of aerosol optical depth (AOD) have been widely used to overcome limited coverage from surface monitoring and to assess the global population exposure to PM2.5 and the associated premature mortality.

The area of land covered by forest and trees is an important indicator of environmental condition. This study presents and analyses results from the Global Forest Resources Assessment 2015 (FRA 2015) of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. FRA 2015 was based on responses to surveys by individual countries using a common reporting framework, agreed definitions and reporting standards.

Original Source

There are slightly more than three trillion trees in the world according to the most comprehensive census yet of global forestation published in the journal Nature.