Isabella Velicogna's office in UC Irvine's Croul Hall looks like it belongs to an artist instead of a university scientist. Her paintings and drawings — including charming sketches of mice — adorn the walls, and colorful, handcrafted mobiles dangle from the ceiling.

Forests in the Amazon Basin are expected to be less vulnerable to wildfires this year, according to the first forecast from a new fire severity model developed by university and NASA researchers.

Fire season across most of the Amazon rain forest typically begins in May, peaks in September and ends in January. The new model, which forecasts the fire season’s severity from three to nine months in advance, calls for an average or below-average fire season this year within 10 regions spanning three countries: Bolivia, Brazil and Peru.

Forecasts of a hurricane's intensity are generally much less accurate than forecasts of its most likely path. Large-scale atmospheric patterns dictate where a hurricane will go and how quickly it will get there. The storm's intensity, however, depends on small-scale shifts in atmospheric stratification, upwelling rates, and other transient dynamics that are difficult to predict. Properly understanding the risk posed by an impending storm depends on having a firm grasp on all three properties: the translational speed, intensity, and path.

Greenland's glaciers are hemorrhaging ice at an increasingly faster rate but not at the breakneck pace that scientists once feared, a new study says.

The loss of ice from the glaciers that cover the island is about 30 percent faster than it was a decade ago, researchers said. That means Greenland's contribution to future sea level rise would be about 4 inches by the year 2100 if ice loss doesn't speed up much more, a study author said.