Niño 1+2

Beyond Neptune, in the icy belt, astronomers watched as object (612533) 2002 XV93 momentarily occulted a distant star. Using метод прохождений (when a planet dims the star's light for a second, like a fly in front of a lamp), Уильям Боруки and Дэвид Шарбонно determined: the light not only dimmed but also shifted…

Every year in Costa Rica, dengue fever arrives like the rainy season: people expect it, they prepare for it, but the exact rhythm of outbreaks has remained a mystery. In some cantons, the disease flares up every year; in others, every two or three years.

Every summer, the same scene unfolds over India: clouds driven from the ocean by the wind release their rain, and how that rain falls on the fields determines the harvest for more than a billion people. Meteorologists have long tried to reduce this mosaic to a single number, the all-India rainfall index, which averages millimeters across the country.

A baker puts a layered cake in the oven: the dough is the same, the heat is the same, but each layer bakes differently. The thin crust on top is already browning, while the middle is still underdone. Earth's climate is similar: the planet is warming, but different parts of it are warming at different rates and at different times.

The orchestra has been playing in the Pacific Ocean for over a century. Some instruments carry a fast melody, others draw out a slow bass line, and together they create a pattern of warm and cold patches on the water's surface.

Every night, an invisible sentinel hangs over the Andes. The GOES-12 satellite, and later its successor GOES-13, watches Earth from an altitude of 36,000 kilometers, recording how the mountains breathe clouds. For five straight years, it tracked where the sky stayed clear and where it got wrapped in cotton.

On an old film strip of rainfall, only the brightest frames are visible, and between them lies noise. A meteorologist assessing flood risk long looked only at such frames, that is, at annual rainfall maxima. Everything else, thousands of daily observations, remained off-screen. The new method develops the entire film, and details that were previously invisible come into view.

The Paraná River behaves like a seismograph that records not the shaking of the ground but the pulse of the Sun. A century of daily water-level measurements at the gauging station in the city of Corrientes, 900 kilometers from the river's mouth, shows that when the Sun has many sunspots, the river floods more. This connection is neither accidental nor weak.