National Aeronautics and Space Administration

n 2019, quite a large number of fires burned in the Amazon rainforests, the most intense blazes in almost a decade. Carbon monoxide (CO) is one byproduct of biomass burning. The included animation shows the evolution and transport of carbon monoxide (CO) using the GEOS model.

An experimental version of GEOS running with nearly 8× as many grid volumes at 6km horizontal resolution with 132 vertical levels and including non-hydrostatic dynamical effects, advanced convection, and cloud physics processes provides an improved representation of the mesoscale features of typhoon Hagibis.

Throughout the entire month of June 2019, over 20% of Europe met the criteria defining a heatwave according to MERRA-2. Long time series are required in order to estimate climate statistics such as the percentiles of temperature, and the Modern Era retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications, Version 2 (MERRA-2) is a tool that can be useful for such studies.

The animation shown, taken from a 10-day forecast initialized on 16 September, 2019, reveals wave breaking on two scales. The global scale that deforms the polar vortex (darkest color) and moves air from the tropics (green and yellow) to the pole, and a wave of smaller scale vortices that mix tropical and high latitude air near 25°S. Here, a wave structure consisting of a chain of six smaller vortices has formed, and these appear to reinforce each other as a coherent wave. Such behavior has not been noted, previously.