Paul Voosen

Washington, D.C.

Archive account of earth, climate, and planetary science reporter at Science mag. No longer active. At @[email protected] and https://t.co/N7I7TMEVzK on Bluesky.

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Articles

30-day forecast? Weather prediction might be able to look beyond 2 weeks

2 weeks ago | science.org | Paul Voosen

It’s a truism almost as old as modern weather prediction: Any forecast beyond 2 weeks will fall apart because of the way tiny perturbations compound in the atmosphere. The 2-week limit, grounded in chaos theory and notions of the “butterfly effect” from the 1960s, has been handed down from generation to generation, says Peter Dueben, head of earth system modeling at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, the world’s leading forecaster.
Hunt for tree rings could yield Africa’s first drought atlas

1 month ago | science.org | Paul Voosen

For decades, a climatological mystery has haunted West Africa. In the 1970s and ’80s, a vicious drought, perhaps the worst worldwide in the 20th century, struck the region, which includes the Guinea coast and the Sahel savanna, just south of the Sahara Desert. The disaster killed tens of thousands of people in Senegal and other countries and caused a mass migration to cities. But then the drought stopped, and nothing like it has occurred since.
Trump seeks to end climate research at premier U.S. climate agency

1 month ago | science.org | Paul Voosen

President Donald Trump’s administration is seeking to end nearly all of the climate research conducted by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA), one of the country’s premier climate science agencies, according to an internal budget document seen by Science. The document indicates the White House is ready to ask Congress to eliminate NOAA’s climate research centers and cut hundreds of federal and academic climate scientists who track and study human-driven global warming.
Trump administration fires staff for flagship U.S. climate assessment

1 month ago | science.org | Paul Voosen

The assault on climate science by President Donald Trump’s administration has been taken to a new level, as NASA has terminated the contract that supports two dozen technical staff at the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), the White House office that coordinates research among the federal agencies.
Curiosity rover detects long-chain carbon molecules on Mars

2 months ago | science.org | Paul Voosen

NASA’s Curiosity rover has detected what could be a chemical relic of long-ago life on Mars: long-chain organic molecules. Found after painstaking reanalysis of data on a sample drilled from a lake that dried up billions of years ago, the molecules likely derived from fatty acids, a common building block of cell membranes on Earth.
Impact that formed the Moon struck a practically newborn Earth

2 months ago | science.org | Paul Voosen

The Woodlands, Texas—For nearly as long as Earth has existed, the Moon has been with it. That’s the conclusion of several studies suggesting the Moon formed some 65 million years after the start of the Solar System—and only tens of millions of years after Earth.
NASA to eliminate chief scientist position

2 months ago | science.org | Paul Voosen

NASA announced today it will eliminate its Office of the Chief Scientist, along with offices advising the agency on technology, strategy, and coordinating its diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) efforts. The reductions, which will eliminate two dozen jobs, come as part of the agency’s “reduction in force,” mandated by the White House.
Earth’s rocks hold whiffs of air from billions of years ago

Mar 5, 2025 | science.org | Paul Voosen

Earth’s atmosphere, the veneer of gases that makes most life possible, has changed dramatically over time. Bubbles of ancient air trapped in polar ice cores provide reliable archives of the past 6 million years—but that’s less than 0.002% of Earth’s history. For the eons before that, which saw the origin and proliferation of life, researchers have had to infer the atmosphere’s composition from evidence of its chemical effects on metals and minerals preserved in ancient rocks.
NOAA firings hit the birthplace of weather and climate forecasting

Mar 4, 2025 | science.org | Paul Voosen

When news of his firing came late last week, Kai-Yuan Cheng, an atmospheric scientist at one of the crown jewels of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), had one thought in mind: He had 1 hour to tie up his research on severe storm forecasting. “I worked to the last minute of my federal employment,” he says.
NASA cuts off international climate science support

Feb 24, 2025 | science.org | Paul Voosen

The world’s nations convened this week in Hangzhou, China, to plan the next major international assessment of climate science—but without the United States. Late last week, President Donald Trump’s administration denied officials permission to travel to the meeting and cut off a technical support contract for the report, the seventh assessment of the United Nations’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).