AI Predicts More "Super Floods" and "Extreme Droughts" for Pakistan.

For the first time, research led by scientists at the University of São Paulo quantifies the impact of forest loss and global climate change on the biome. 

Too little snowfall is now also shaking the foundations of some of the world’s most resilient 'water towers', a new study led by the Pellicciotti group at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) shows. After establishing a monitoring network on a new benchmark glacier in central Tajikistan, the international team of researchers was able to model the entire catchment’s behavior from 1999 to 2023. The results, showing decreasing glacier health, were published in Communications Earth & Environment.

When it comes to clouds, the region in the far south of New Zealand (Aotearoa) is unique in the world: it is one of the most pristine, cleanest but yet accessible regions on the planet. An international consortium with participation of the Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research (TROPOS) and the University of Leipzig will therefore study the clouds in this region in detail for one and a half years during the "goSouth-2" campaign. Embedded in goSouth-2, the Project ACADIA, funded by the German Research Community, will investigate in particular the influence of small changes in air quality on cloud formation. The remote sensing observations from the ground are an important link between the "HALO-South" aircraft mission of the German research aircraft HALO in September-October 2025 and the expeditions of the German research vessels Sonne and Polarstern planned for 2027/28, all of which will investigate the atmosphere of the Southern Ocean at the edge of Antarctica. New Zealand’s MetService and the University of Canterbury in Christchurch (Ōtautahi) are also significantly involved in the projects.

Glaciers across High Mountain Asia are losing more than 22 gigatons of ice per year. The impact of a warming climate on glacial loss is undisputed—this new study provides the first evidence that seasonal shifts in rainfall and snowfall patterns, particularly of the South Asian monsoons, are also exacerbating glacier melting across the region.