Climate change

Scientists know so little about how storms affect the delicate balance of lake ecosystems that we may be unable to protect them from the effects of climate change, says a NIWA scientist.

Scientists undertaking the annual Southern Alps end-of-summer snowline survey this week will be using advanced photographic technology to help clarify obscure snowlines due to ash and dust from the Australian bushfires.

NIWA researchers have helped unlock information trapped in ancient air samples from Greenland and Antarctica that shows the amount of methane humans are emitting into the atmosphere from fossil fuels has been vastly underestimated.

Dr Rob Bell worked out a long time ago that sea-level rise is much more than a scientific problem. No wonder then that people say his ability to listen is one of his best traits.

In the past 10 years, more weather records have been broken than in any other time in New Zealand’s history.

This page provides a summary of projected climate change hazards. 

New Zealand has just experienced its hottest November on record, according to NIWA climate scientists.

Novel handwriting recognition project casts new light on historic weather data.

New Zealand’s changing ocean environment has prompted the call to develop a system that will keep closer tabs on information from scientific monitoring buoys so the data they produce can be shared as widely as possible.

Expect to hear a lot more about climate change in the news in the weeks ahead – and a lot about NIWA’s work underpinning the science that is signalling a warmer world right now and its effects in the future.

While we know that glaciers are sensitive to changes in their local climate, our understanding of exactly how mountain glaciers will respond to climate change is incomplete.