New research found that the century-old yardstick used across many industries to estimate air-conditioning and refrigeration energy demand — called cooling degree days — is missing something fundamental. The study reports a new, physics-based version of the metric — effective cooling degree days — that captures how temperature and humidity together impact the actual work a cooling system is required to do. Applying it across North America, they found that cooling efficiency has been quietly declining by 2–4% per decade since 1971, and that the old temperature-only metric misjudges how much cooling is required in different regions, overstating demand in some places and understating it in others.

A new Swansea University study has shown that upstream river management rather than local rainfall is the primary driver of one of the world's most important wetlands. An analysis of two decades of satellite observations revealed the future of Iraq's Mesopotamian Marshes depends far more on the water flowing from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers than on rainfall.

A recent study uncovers the most comprehensive explanation to date for the unprecedented Arctic ozone event of March 2024, revealing new insights into the complex connections between tropical variability, atmospheric wave dynamics and polar ozone in a warming world.