Philippe Matthews Show Guru Advice, Author Reviews, Tech Reviews, Entertainment News

The spiraling cost of satellite programs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has lawmakers from both parties sniffing around for a strategy to trim the agency's budget. [More]

Everyone knows that we as humans literally owe the air we breathe to the greenery around us. As school children we learned that plants (as well as algae and cyanobacteria) perform the all-important biological "magic trick" known as photosynthesis , which helps generate the atmospheric oxygen we take in with every breath. [More]

By Deborah Zabarenko WASHINGTON (Reuters) - As much of the United States basks in summer-like temperatures, weather and climate experts said this year's warm winter could mean early corn planting, a risk of killing frost for apricots and a baby boom for tree-chomping bark beetles in the West. The winter of 2011-12 was the fourth-warmest in the 117-year record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which uses meteorological winter, which ended on February 29. [More]

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has abandoned an effort to reconstruct a detailed picture of hour-by-hour changes in the atmosphere stretching back to the 19th century. [More]

SAN FRANCISCO -- The United States was battered this year by at least 12 natural disasters that each caused at least $1 billion in damages , the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said yesterday. [More]

A House-Senate deal to fund the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration includes enough cash to stabilize the nation's struggling environmental satellite program, a top agency official said yesterday. [More]

Though burning natural gas produces much less greenhouse gas emissions than burning coal, a new study indicates switching over coal-fired power plants to natural gas would have a negligible effect on the changing climate. Tom Wigley, a senior research associate at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, reports that if natural gas were substituted for coal in energy production, climate change trends would not slow down and may, in fact, accelerate. His findings are due to be published in the journal Climatic Change Letters

By Yereth Rosen ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) - A mysterious orange goo that collected on shorelines in a village in Alaska is made up of fungal spores, according to scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Three large explosions from the Sun over the past few days have prompted U.S.

The devastating string of tornadoes, droughts, wildfires and floods that hit the United States this spring marks 2011 as one of the most extreme years on record, according to a new federal analysis. Just shy of the halfway mark, 2011 has seen eight $1-billion-plus disasters, with total damages from wild weather at more than $32 billion, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Agency officials said that total could grow significantly, since they expect this year's North Atlantic hurricane season, which began June 1, will be an active one.

Sprawl isn't just eating up the countryside--it's also blocking the breezes that would otherwise clear out air pollution. That's according to a new study of Houston from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, to be published in the Journal of Geophysical Research

STATE COLLEGE, Pa.--AccuWeather.com reports nearly 1,200 tornadoes have been reported in the United States so far this year, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). 2011 is a year destined for the tornado record book

The tornado that plowed a wide swath of death and destruction through Joplin, Mo., on Sunday unleashed winds of up to 198 miles per hour, federal forecasters said yesterday. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's preliminary analysis ranks the twister as an F4, the second-highest rating on the five-point scale used to classify tornadoes. [More]

This year's Atlantic hurricane season will be "above normal," with 12 to 18 storms, thanks in part to unusually warm ocean temperatures, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said yesterday.

The fiscal 2011 budget compromise crafted by the White House and congressional leaders would delay a key federal climate and weather satellite program, making a lengthy gap in critical environmental data a near certainty. Cuts contained in the 2011 budget plan would push back the launch of the first Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) orbiter by at least 18 months past the current 2016 target, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief Jane Lubchenco said yesterday.