NATIONAL
May 10, 2012 | By Mark K. Matthews, Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON - The number of U.S. satellites watching Earth is expected to plummet by 2020, and weather forecasting, including hurricane tracking, could suffer as a result, a new report warns. The study, released last week by the nation's top science advisors, estimated that the fleet of science satellites operated by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would "decline precipitously" from a peak of 110 probes last year to fewer than 30 in 2020. The drop is a result of several factors, including budget problems and rocket accidents, and scientists said the United States risked blurring its vision of Earth if it did not act quickly to replace satellites expected to die during the next eight years.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
May 6, 2012 | By Rong-Gong Lin II, Los Angeles Times
La Niña, the demon diva of drought, has ended, but what comes next could be even more foreboding: La Nada. La Nada, or "nothing" in Spanish, is climatologist Bill Patzert's nickname for when surface sea temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean are about normal. That means ocean temperatures are not too warm, which would trigger an El Niño and would typically mean a rainy winter in Southern California. The sea also is not too cold, which produces a La Niña and usually means a dry season.
SCIENCE
May 4, 2012 | By Amina Khan, Los Angeles Time
A stream of highly charged particles from the sun is headed straight toward Earth, threatening to plunge cities around the world into darkness and bring the global economy screeching to a halt. This isn't the premise of the latest doomsday thriller. Massive solar storms have happened before - and another one is likely to occur soon, according to Mike Hapgood, a space weather scientist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford, England. Much of the planet's electronic equipment, as well as orbiting satellites, have been built to withstand these periodic geomagnetic storms.
BUSINESS
May 2, 2012 | By Jerry Hirsch, Los Angeles Times
Strong gains in U.S. auto sales over the last six months eased in April as the Easter holiday, bad weather and fewer selling days ate into the business of some of the largest automakers, includingGeneral Motors Co. andFord Motor Co. But analysts and industry officials don't see the industry slipping further and said the falloff was probably temporary. "Taking it all into consideration, we are holding the trend of a moderate recovery," said Jeff Schuster, an analyst at LMC Automotive.
ENTERTAINMENT
April 23, 2012 | By Jessica Gelt and Gerrick Kennedy, Los Angeles Times
Ask anyone who attended both weekends of the 2012 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival what the big difference was between the events, and you'll likely end up talking about the weather. The festival, which kicked off April 13 and featured 140-plus artists, expanded from one weekend to two this year for the first time in its 13-year history. Although the lineup of artists - from the Black Keys to Radiohead to Snoop Dogg andDr. Dre - was identical each weekend, the same could not be said of the weather.
OPINION
April 22, 2012 | By John M. Wallace
This year's late winter heat wave over much of the United States, dubbed "March Madness," has been cited as evidence that human-induced global warming is causing the climate system to stray far outside its normal range of variability. The thousands of all-time high temperature records shattered during last month's climate rampage have been likened to home-run records shattered by a baseball player on steroids. It is true that the signature of human-induced global warming is clearly apparent in the increasing number of new high temperature records, which are currently outnumbering low temperature records by a factor of about 3 to 1. Just as a rising tide lifts all ships, a rise in global mean temperature is bound to raise the levels of the highest temperatures.