Guest post by Mark Serreze, NSIDC Director and Professor, Department of Geography, University of Colorado Boulder

In the Rocky Mountains, as in many mountain ranges worldwide, snowpack is getting dirtier. Winds carry fine sediment particles from arid regions, and dust lofted high enough into the atmosphere...

Like El Niño and La Niña, the Arctic Oscillation (AO) is a big-picture of atmospheric conditions that influence weather. The AO, which alternates between two distinct modes, describes how pressure...

People sometimes wonder if the weather they are experiencing locally, such as the heavy snow that fell in...