The paper – published today in Nature Communications – shows that while wildfire smoke increasingly covers large portions of the U.S., losses of average, or background, photovoltaic solar resources remain modest outside of the areas immediately surrounding active fires, where smoke plumes are dense.

A new study investigating ancient methane trapped in Antarctic ice suggests that global increases in wildfire activity likely occurred during periods of abrupt climate change throughout the last Ice Age.

Advances in Atmospheric Science recently published a special topic​ on solar energy meteorology, led by scientists from the Harbin Institute of Technology and the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. This issue consists of five invited articles featuring progress and challenges in satellite remote sensing, solar system modeling, photovoltaic power forecasting, thermal balance of solar panels and decarbonization strategy.

Recently, a research team led by Professor Shuxiao Wang from the School of Environment at Tsinghua University integrated a comprehensive global natural archive database of mercury (Hg) accumulation with modelled global atmospheric Hg deposition data. This integration revealed how global ecosystems respond to changes in atmospheric Hg input. The findings of this research were published in the National Science Review.