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 No longer active.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

U.S. military trims access to its critical sea ice measurements

2 weeks ago | science.org | Paul Voosen

For nearly 4 decades, researchers have tracked one of the most prominent harbingers of global warming—dwindling Arctic sea ice—with data from aging weather satellites run by the U.S. military. But this continuous record is now at risk, after the Department of Defense (DOD) quietly told climate scientists it would be “deprioritizing” access to the data. The move comes as Arctic sea ice approaches a possible new record low.
Dozens of active and planned NASA spacecraft killed in Trump budget request

2 weeks ago | science.org | Paul Voosen

President Donald Trump’s administration is seeking to throttle the scientific ambitions of NASA, prematurely ending a host of active missions in orbit studying Earth and other planets, while also ending the agency’s work to develop their successors.
Local predictions of climate change are hazy. But cities need answers fast

2 weeks ago | science.org | Paul Voosen

1.0x 00:00 21:19 1.0x Audio is AI-generated. Report an issue|Give feedback Austin, Texas—A wastewater treatment plant isn’t top on everyone’s sightseeing itinerary.
Farming maize in ice age Michigan, predicting the future climate of cities, and our host takes a quiz on the sounds of science

2 weeks ago | science.org | Sarah Crespi |Paul Voosen |Kevin McLean

McLeester et al., Science 2025 First up on the podcast, we hear from Staff Writer Paul Voosen about the tricky problem of regional climate prediction. Although global climate change models have held up for the most part, predicting what will happen at smaller scales, such as the level of a city, is proving a stubborn challenge. Just increasing the resolution of global models requires intense computing power, so researchers and city planners are looking to other approaches to find out what’s...
Dozens of active and planned NASA spacecraft killed in Trump budget request

3 weeks ago | science.org | Paul Voosen

President Donald Trump’s administration is seeking to throttle the scientific ambitions of NASA, prematurely ending a host of active missions in orbit studying Earth and other planets, while also ending the agency’s work to develop their successors.
30-day forecast? Weather prediction might be able to look beyond 2 weeks

1 month 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

2 months 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

2 months 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.