A positive spin on Earth Day from WU

The challenges facing our global environment are serious indeed, but there are many smart people working on solutions, and there’s much to be optimistic about. At Weather Underground, we’re highlighting a wide range of these good-news stories in a special WU microsite created in honor of Earth Day. The theme is progress: through a collection of articles by researchers, field experts, and scientists, the microsite outlines the current state of our climate, how humans can adapt in coming years, and the various ways that we can minimize the damage to our planet's precious ecosystem.

Among the topics we cover:

--How climate change will influence food and wine production

--Why we needed Earth Day, and how it’s evolved since 1970

--The true cost of water: how water and energy are inextricably intertwined

--What a terrarium can teach us about the atmosphere, plus how to make your own

--How middle-school kids are using personal weather stations to learn about weather and climate

We invite you to dig into the microsite today as well as after Earth Day. It’s full of accessible information from experts and packed of engaging artwork and informative graphics. As is our tradition on Earth Day, we also present at the bottom of this post Dr. Jeff Masters' favorite wunderphotos uploaded to our web site over the past year. The Weather Underground staff has also put together an Earth Day gallery of 50 all-time awesome wunderphotos. Thanks go to everyone who has participated in making this the largest (1.8 million!) and best weather photo gallery on the Internet--your photos are truly an inspiration! Many of the choices were taken from our Worldview Gallery, updated weekly with the top wunderphotos of the week.

Jeff Masters and Bob Henson


Figure 1. Top wunderphoto of the past year: “Clouds to the Left", was taken on July 16, 2014 in Omaha, Nebraska, by wunderphotographer LarryD. Driving across Nebraska, it’s the scenery above that always impresses!