The launch of a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ship last year looked like it went perfectly, except holy crap it looked like it exploded and killed a lady. Everyone survived, there were just injuries. So what happened?

All up and down the east coast of North America, news of an incoming blizzard has been brewing for days. Before it hit, people from New York and Connecticut to Ontario knew in advance to expect over a foot of snow. We take this kind of accurate forecasting for granted, but we shouldn't. Our ability to predict the…

Benjamin Franklin's perspicacity never fails to amaze. In few places is his mental acuity more evident than his letters of correspondence, wherein Franklin frequently ruminated on topics scientific, technical and philosophical. What follows is an excerpt from one such letter, originally addressed to a scientific…

Why don't we nuke hurricanes? Apparently the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration gets asked this question often enough that it has produced an official response, explaining in no uncertain terms why launching a nuclear missile into the eye of a storm "would not be an effective hurricane modification technique."

December 25th is fast approaching — will yours be snow-laden? This map, released by NOAA and the National Climatic Data Center, gives the probability of a "White Christmas" across the continental United States.

Sea levels are on the rise. Is your home at risk of being submerged in the next 10, 50, 100, 300 years? The New York Times is featuring a great interactive applet that will help you find out. Unlike Surging Seas (the similarly themed applet launched by the folks at Climate Central earlier this year), the NYT app…

Back in the late 1990s, NOAA's Acoustic Monitoring Project recorded a series of haunting, creepy noises from deep beneath the ocean's surface (you can hear it in the audio above). When this recording began to circulate in the media, people went crazy speculating about the sea monsters, secret government experiments, …

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) was using its GOES-13 satellite to capture Hurricane Sandy as it went from being a fierce tropical storm, to a full-blown hurricane this morning when it made landfall on Jamaica. You can watch as the surging clouds slowly begin to cycle around each other,…

The graphic up top, borrowed from NOAA's latest State of the Climate Report, really encapsulates everything there is to know about last month's unprecedented temperatures, but here's the relevant bit from the Administration for those of you itching for hard figures:

Using almost sixty years' worth of data from NOAA, designer John Nelson has produced a mesmerizing visualization of tornado activity in the United States. Ever wondered where "Tornado Alley" got its name? Wonder no more.